Seattle Schools Board Meeting Feb 12, 2025

Good afternoon.

We will call the meeting to order momentarily and SPS TV will begin broadcasting.

All right the February 12th 2025 regular board meeting is called to order at 4 23 p.m.

We would like to acknowledge that we are on the ancestral lands and traditional territories of the Puget Sound Coast Salish people.

Miss Wilson Jones the roll call please.

Vice President Briggs.

Is she not yet in the room?

Okay.

Vice President Briggs has walked in.

Here.

Director Clark.

Present.

Director Hersey.

Here.

Director Mizrahi.

Present.

Director Rankin.

Here.

Director Sarju.

Present.

Director Bragg.

Here.

Director Elias.

Present.

Director Yoon.

Present.

And President Topp.

Here.

Here.

All right.

I will now turn it over to Superintendent Jones for his comments.

Thank you, President Topp and board members and everyone here tonight.

To open the evening, I want to shout out and congratulate the Lincoln and Cleveland High School volleyball teams for their status as the 2024 academic state champions.

This is a prestigious honor and a testament to their hard work and dedication on and off the court, achieving the highest average GPA amongst teams in their classification.

This is no small feat, and it speaks volumes about their discipline, perseverance, and the culture of academics and athletic success fostered by their coaches, teachers, and families.

Congratulations to our student athletes for setting such a high standard.

We are extremely proud of you.

Are you all in the house tonight?

Stand up, stand up.

That's right.

My daughter went to Cleveland, so I'm a little biased around what they do.

That's such a good educational environment.

Thank you, Cleveland.

Thank you, Lincoln, as well.

So I'm also pleased to announce both levees have passed.

Start clapping already.

I want to take a moment to express my sincere gratitude to the Seattle voters for renewing the educational programs and operations levy and the building excellence capital levy.

Your continued investment ensures that our students have the resources they need for a strong education, funding everything from classroom learning and special education services to safety, building improvements, and technology.

We appreciate the commitment to Seattle students and schools and extend our sincere appreciation to your support and being an essential part of Seattle Public Schools community.

Let us be reminded and let me remind you that we will continue to be good stewards of taxpayers dollars.

It's particularly telling that the levees passed on our 100th day of school.

Thank you for 100 days of excellence in teaching and learning.

We have 80 more to go.

I want to note that our voters have given us the authority to spend above and beyond what the state's current funding ceiling is.

We are actively advocating to the state legislature to allow us to lift our lid on our levy authority so that we can fully take advantage of the spending authority which the voters have entrusted us with.

The levy lid is just part of our multi-pronged legislative agenda.

We are actively working with our legislators on securing essential funding, and I believe strongly that our legislators are fighting for us, and I will continue to make the case on specific bills and in conversations with the delegation, with our legislative delegation as a whole.

I'd also like to acknowledge that Director Rankin, our board legislative liaison, has been ready and willing to push forward and had a big presence in Olympia already.

I want to switch to inclement weather.

I want to thank our school leaders, educators, and staff for your flexibility and resilience in continuing to deliver instruction during inclement weather.

I had the opportunity to visit our virtual classrooms at the Skill Center, Cleveland High School, Jane Addams Middle School, and Highland Park Elementary School during remote learning.

And I saw lots of learning going on, so hats off and congratulations to our educators for making that happen.

Today we'll have progress monitoring, and we do this monthly, and tonight we're going to report on literacy and math.

This progress monitoring keeps us accountable.

But because of no new data is available since the last time we reported out, we'll be sharing some of the strategies that we're implementing as part of the teaching and learning and instructional cycle.

So how we continue to monitor is that we monitor how we're doing relative to the state and to our peers, and it's really important to know that we are making progress.

Are we making enough progress?

Not yet, but we put things in place to make sure that our students are getting the full opportunities from our educational service model.

I want to thank the board for finalizing our top goals and guardrails, and these are what's going to be guiding our work for the next five years.

And a good way to describe our goals and guardrails is having a strong start and a strong finish.

We're talking about second grade literacy, sixth grade math, and pathways for being life ready.

My principals and team reviewed these yesterday during our engagement session, and we're building strong organizational understanding.

We are being intentional about this work in response to some of our studies that we had, and particularly one that was on governance.

And so we're really trying to make sure that at the top of the organization, the board understands, then the superintendent, and then the principals and school leaders, and then our educators understand how do these goals manifest, whether they manifest in CSIPs or they manifest in the classroom.

We want to make sure that they're active and effective.

So we want to make sure that we are getting ready for this next strategic plan.

And what we have is year zero work.

And this is the work that we're doing to analyze what are our gaps in services right now?

What are our gaps in programs?

What are our gaps in operations?

So that when we lead out to this next strategic plan, we know what's happening.

We have a clear understanding.

We have a clear diagnosis of what our organizational challenges are.

And one of those areas that we're looking at is highly capable.

And so tonight we're going to give our board an update on where we are with providing highly capable services.

Tonight's intended to mark an honest rendering ahead, and we'll have more details coming forward.

But we really want to give some visibility to what the challenges are and what the opportunities are.

So it's important that we have access, assurances, and adequate support when we're providing highly capable opportunities for our students.

This is Black History Month and really want to take pride in the work that we've done to recognize the struggle and liberation of black people and celebrate their accomplishments.

We're doing this by sharing with students, having our students share with adults their inspiring stories, passions, and the legacies that we are leaving.

And so it's an opportunity for us to affirm a really important population and the legacy of African-American people in this country.

As we all know, there's some federal changes that are happening, and we are trying to be responsive and intentional and stay true to our values.

We want to make sure that we serve as a reminder that we're still committed to the ideals and the values of Seattle Public Schools, particularly in policy 0010 and policy 0030. It's important that we really kind of affirm that we're still committed to those.

And as we look at our immigration, our immigrants and our refugee populations, our LGBTQIA plus students, particularly our transgender and non-binary students, we have to continue to reaffirm that we are trying to commit to having safe and welcoming environments for those students.

And so we're going to continue to monitor the impacts of the changes at the federal agencies and the department level, including the Department of Education, and how those may or may not impact Seattle Public Schools.

So we're going to keep watch on those developments, and we want to try to make sure that we respond accordingly.

So that concludes my remarks, and I want to give it back to you, President Topp.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Dr. Jones.

Quick housekeeping item.

We will do a quick break before progress monitoring, just so, oh, nevermind, the students are leaving.

I was gonna say just so board members could chat and congratulate the Cleveland students, but have a good evening.

Thank you so much for coming this evening.

All right, then we will go straight to student board member comments.

Doctor, or director Elias.

Yeah, doctor.

Hopefully.

As student board members wanted to say, students are aware of what is happening around them.

They see and experience the challenges that affect their peers, their schools, and their communities.

The best way for parents, faculty, teachers, and the district to respond is not just by acknowledging these concerns but by actively educating students and providing them with the resources to navigate difficult and unfortunate situations.

Seattle Public Schools serves a diverse student body, including many from marginalized communities who often face unique struggles.

Right now, students are not just concerned, they are scared.

They fear for their friends, their safety, and their future.

It is our responsibility as a community to foster an environment where students feel heard, protected, and empowered.

Addressing these issues requires more than just policies.

It requires open conversations, mental health support, and proactive measures to ensure all students feel secure in their schools.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, Director.

Director Bragg.

I know I have to follow that.

My other comments to that is the fact that we as students are talking about it.

We do know what's happening and we are there for each other.

And we do know that our schools are there for us.

And we appreciate all the work that and all the students I've talked to appreciate all the work that SPS is putting in to ensuring that they understand that safety.

and legislative session.

Many.

On the student board member side, I have personally been keeping up with it all and making sure we get emails out on legislation that we are supporting and that SBS is supporting.

And I think that's it for our comments.

Thank you, Director Bragg.

All right, perfect.

Then we are going to move on to board and liaison reports, and I'm going to start and I'm going to start this section of the meeting really always focusing on our board work plan and how we are holding accountable to what we say we're going to do flagging where we may be off for whatever reason and making sure that we all have a shared understanding also of what is coming up.

SO DIRECTORS HAVE BEEN BUSY LIFTING UP KEY PRIORITIES.

I WILL FLAG DIRECTOR RANKIN, CHAIR OF THE AD HOC POLICY MANUAL REVIEW COMMITTEE.

SHE MAY ADDRESS THIS FURTHER, BUT I'LL NOTE THAT HER COMMITTEE IS UNDERWAY WITH ITS FIRST MEETING LATER THIS MONTH WITH UPDATES PLANNED TO COME TO THE FULL BOARD AT THE CLOSE OF THE YEAR.

WE'RE ALSO IDENTIFYING THE GOVERNANCE WORK NEEDED TO SUPPORT STUDENT SAFETY IN THE AD HOC STUDENT SAFETY COMMITTEE AND I LOOK FORWARD TO HEARING FROM STAFF ON THEIR RECOMMENDATIONS IN AREAS WHERE THE BOARD CAN BEST SUPPORT THIS WORK.

We continue as a board to engage in professional development, and we were able to check off some boxes here.

Our governance coaches joined Director Mizorahi, Dr. Jones, board office staff, and me yesterday to learn more about best practices for agenda.

DEVELOPMENT.

WE ALSO HAD A CHANCE TO REVIEW OUR WORK PLAN ALONGSIDE THEIR RECOMMENDATIONS FOR IMPROVING OUR GOVERNANCE PRACTICES.

LOOKING AHEAD, STAFF ARE RECEIVING TRAINING ON TIME USE EVALUATION TO SUPPORT THE BOARD HERE ON RECEIVING ON OUR QUARTERLY EVALUATION PROCESS, AND IT SOUNDS LIKE WE MAY HAVE JUST SCHEDULED THE PROGRESS MONITORING TRAINING AND DIRECTOR HERSEY IS COORDINATING THAT.

ON THAT FRONT FROM THE QUARTERLY SELF-EVALUATION, I'VE ASKED STAFF TO ASSIGN EACH BOARD DIRECTOR A SECTION OF THE QUARTERLY EVALUATION FOR COMPLETION IN ADVANCE OF EACH EVALUATION SESSION.

SO PLEASE BE ON A LOOKOUT FOR THAT.

ASSIGNMENTS ARE COMING SOON AND COME PREPARED so we can have a fruitful conversation.

Sort of the next bucket on our work plan is engagement, remains a huge focus.

We had three engagement sessions last month, which accumulated, sorry, in the adoption of our new goals and guardrails.

And I'm super, super excited for a full board engagement session on February 26th at Bailey Gatzer Elementary School on the budget and legislative session.

It will start with sort of a short presentation from staff.

ABOUT BUDGET INFORMATION, MOST OF WHICH WAS SHARED WITH THE BOARD IN JANUARY, AND THEN WE ARE GOING TO MOVE TO A COMMUNITY DISCUSSION.

WE'LL SEE A CADENCE OF THIS HAPPENING WITH AN ENGAGEMENT SESSION WITH BOARD ON A MONTHLY BASIS.

SCHOOL VISITS WAS ALSO ONE OF THE THINGS.

WE DID HAVE SOME CHANGES TO OUR SCHOOL VISITS SCHEDULE IN JANUARY, FLAGGING THIS.

AS SOMETHING THAT WE DID NOT FULLY GET ACCOMPLISHED IN JANUARY, BUT WORKING TO GET AHEAD OF IT AND MAKE SURE IT'S BACK ON THE CALENDAR HERE IN FEBRUARY.

A FINAL NOTE THAT TODAY'S AGENDA INCLUDES THE ANNUAL BOARD DIRECTOR AND SENIOR STAFF ETHICS DISCLOSURE FORMS.

RIVETING READING.

SO THAT IS THE END OF MY SORT OF UPDATE ON WHERE THINGS ARE AT, BUT I WANT TO GO TO BOARD COMMITTEE CHAIRS AND LIAISONS FOR REPORTS.

Director Rankin.

All right.

Can you hear me?

Yeah, okay.

Thank you, President Topp.

So I am reporting to you as the legislative liaison.

I attached to the information items section of this meeting agenda is an overview of legislative activity at the state and federal level over the past month.

I provide updates to the board and superintendent on a weekly basis.

And so what's attached to the meeting is a summary of those minus things that are no longer relevant as stuff happens very quickly during session.

But you can find in that a bill comparison on some bills in the house for special education, three different bills.

You can find links to some other information including some stuff at the federal level that we've talked about here already.

Also, there's a link to our superintendent procedure for engagement or boundaries around protecting immigrant students in our schools and some other things.

Something I wanted to note as we react and respond to the, I don't know what to call it, The swirl, the fire hose of things coming at the federal level, we will not be unaffected, of course.

But it's important to note that executive orders don't apply to us.

we are we operate under the authority of the state and our state governor attorney general ospi have been really clear about maintaining and upholding our state law and so until we hear differently we're still committed to and part of our state's government we're authorized to operate a public school district by the state So there's more about that there.

I was in Olympia yesterday for the Senate Ways and Means Committee.

Ways and Means is the Senate committee that determines where the money, what their recommendations on spending.

goes and so the the big three as many as we're all uniting around for public schools in terms of our funding deficits across the state special education transportation and msoc which is materials and supplies there was a hearing yesterday in the senate ways and means committee about those issues the big bills on those issues and it was actually surprisingly sparse in the room and I plan to continue showing up even if I'm not speaking and invite my colleagues and any members of the community to join.

Even if you don't testify, it does send a message to our legislators that these high priority things that we really care about when they can see people showing up for it.

It is a trek to get down there, but it also shows putting in the effort to get down there shows how much of a priority it is.

What I was really pleased to hear in testimony on these bills was how much we learned from our effectiveness in uniting around common messages two years ago for special education.

And yes, and Dr. Jones provided testimony yesterday.

But how much we've come aligned around these big three as a priority.

There's also conversation about that our issue really is the underlying funding formula, the prototypical school model, and the way in which we fund schools in our state is not equitable and is not adequate.

And the focus this session is to say to our legislature, Right now, stop the bleeding, help us close these big gaps, and we need to talk about the underlying formulas or we're going to just have to keep coming back and back and back for the same Band-Aids.

So the asks for special education, there are multiple different things that the statewide coalition is focused on.

Our top priority is focusing on increasing the tiered multiplier.

That's the amount of money that's allocated per student with an IEP.

So if you are talking with folks about this, that's your number one talking point, is increase the multiplier, increase the multiplier, increase the multiplier.

We also, whoops.

That is also something to watch as these various bills move through their committees and into the opposite chamber.

is how things are adjusted in terms of the multiplier.

So for example, Senate Bill 2536 started with an ask of, or in the policy bill was increasing the multiplier to 1.5, that's already been reduced to 1.32.

So as these bills move, bills we like are going to change.

So as things get closer and closer to the finish line and the reality sets in of what people have, what flexibility there is to pay for these things.

So watching the multiplier is really key.

in MSOC, or Material Supplies and Operating Costs.

Again, there are multiple bills that do a couple of different things.

Our ask is increasing the per-student allocations to close that gap between the actual operational costs and what the state provides.

And specifically, the insurance costs and utilities are some of the biggest costs, but they're not the whole bucket.

And so we really wanna make sure that the per student allocations are being increased across all of those eight areas, not just those big two.

And then in transportation, school districts need a funding formula that is predictable, that is easy to use and that provides the reimbursement to districts based on what it costs to transport students.

And so in the immediate, we're asking for, well, we're asking really for an overhaul to the, it's called STARS, the allocation reporting system that reimburses, and just to make it simpler and clearer and more predictable for districts.

Yes, most exciting update all night.

So there's a lot going on.

We're about a third of the way through session.

Things will continue to move quickly, continue to change and evolve.

Advocates, if you've gone once, written once, that's awesome.

Do it again.

AND KEEP DOING IT BECAUSE WE HAVE THE ATTENTION OF THE LEGISLATURE RIGHT NOW IN PUBLIC EDUCATION AND WE WANT TO KEEP IT THERE.

AS PRESIDENT TOP SAID, OUR FIRST AD HOC POLICY COMMITTEE MEETING IS LATER THIS MONTH.

ON MONDAY THE 24TH, WE WILL BE STARTING WITH AN OVERVIEW OF THE COMMITTEE WORK FROM 2023. and doing a training on policy evaluation.

So if you have been riveted by this update, you will want to tune in for that training because it's more of this.

So yeah, but it's exciting work and really critical.

And thank you, everybody, for staying engaged and supporting our students.

PERFECT THANK YOU DIRECTOR RANKIN AND JUST SO FLAGGING ONE MORE TIME IF ANYONE CAN MAKE JUST THE TRAINING ON THE 24TH I THINK IT'S WELCOME TO ALL BOARD MEMBERS THE COMMITTEE MEETINGS OPEN TO EVERYONE AS WELL BUT I THINK IT WOULD BE VALUABLE AND THANK YOU DIRECTOR RANKIN FOR ALL OF YOUR HARD WORK IN THE LEGISLATION Legislature it is a sprint and we appreciate and we appreciate the continual updates to the board that you provide I appreciate those updates from you.

So thank you for that and I love that this this quote from you We have the attention of the legislature on education and we want to keep it there.

Yes for sure Other board directors All right, then we are going to move to the tables for progress monitoring.

I will note that we will be back here at five to start public testimony.

We may have to jump back into progress monitoring.

We may split it up, but we will start public testimony at five.

All right, so to make the most of the short time that we have here at the U, we're gonna go ahead and get started.

Thank you, President Topp.

When we adopted the progress monitoring calendar at the beginning of this year, there were a couple of dates that staff notified us that would not have new interim metric data.

The board decided to keep these dates to ensure monthly monitoring and tonight is the first of those two such sessions.

As noted in the memos, staff are bringing forward data on additional student assessment tools that are used within our system.

These tools provide information for teachers to inform practice and instruction.

They are part of the way that our goals metrics cascade through the entire district.

While this is not our typical progress monitoring session, it will provide us with a window into how and what happens in the boardroom impacts what is happening in the classroom and how we are using data at every level of our system.

With that, I will turn it over to Dr. Jones.

Thank you.

Thank you and recognizing that we probably will have a break in by five o'clock.

We'll go as far as we can.

And all of us were teachers before, so we can adjust.

So good evening.

And as part of our regular board meeting, I'd like to transition to progress monitoring discussion so we can outline tonight's discussion around goals our third grade reading goals and our seventh grade math goals.

This is our seventh formal opportunity to review student outcomes in these two areas using this formal progress monitoring framework.

I'm joined tonight by colleagues from our Office of Academics, Dr. Mike Starosky, Assistant Superintendent of Academics, and Dr. Caleb Perkins, Executive Director of College Career Readiness.

So during tonight's presentation, I'll begin by summarizing our theory of action for both goals before recapping the data shared in previous memos from this school year, including fall MAP.

I will then conclude by discussing the curriculum embedded assessments work that our schools have been engaged in and the steps that our team is taking in response to that.

So if we can go to slide two, And we're going to start the conversation talking about third grade reading.

As a reminder, the top line metric for third grade reading has been based on the percentage of black boys and students of color who achieve ELA English language arts proficiency or higher in the third grade smarter balance assessment.

so this interim these interim measures are based on third grade map and second grade spring map the top line goal for the seventh grade math has been based on the percentage of black boys and teens and students of color who achieve proficiency or higher on the seventh grade smarter balance assessment The interims for our math goal include seventh grade fall map and sixth grade spring map testing.

Given that no new interim or top line data are available at this time, the focus of tonight's session will be spent on quickly summarizing the key findings from both the top line data shared in October and the most recent interim data in December, starting with third grade reading before we discuss several important and we'll discuss several important implementation updates.

And that's going to be particularly the work that we're doing to help students achieve the set goals through curriculum embedded assessments.

So you all received the memos last week, and as a result, I'm going to proceed with outlining our theory of action for helping students achieve grade level proficiency in reading and math.

And then if we have time, we'll go on to start talking about curriculum embedded assessments.

So next slide, please.

Working from backwards to the left, our theory of action for achieving our academic goals start with ensuring more teachers deliver high-quality, standards-aligned, culturally responsive instruction.

The teachers will be able to do that when they're given ongoing job-embedded professional learning and support grounded in student data and research-based instructional practices.

Ongoing professional learning and support is in turn enabled by our district's investment in a number of areas, including high quality curriculum and assessments, including curriculum embedded assessments and instructional coaching.

Those investments in turn enable our system's leadership ability to align the central office's work across departments to enable system-wide continuous improvement.

So I think that might be a good stopping point and we can go on to, we'll start back with talking about curriculum embedded assessments.

Is that okay?

Director Hersey?

Okay, so we'll go on back up for testimony and then we'll kick back.

You have six more minutes.

We can't start public testimony till five.

All right, well let's go on to the next slide then.

Thank you.

So a key lever for achieving instructional excellence and aligning our system for continuous improvement is the implementation of curriculum embedded assessments.

Looking at this curriculum embedded assessment system, system-wide, gives us an opportunity to have common assessment windows to ensure everyone across the district is looking at the same data at the same time and using that information to inform ongoing cycles of instructional improvement, as you see depicted here on the screen.

So next slide, please.

So we have assessment types.

Curriculum embedded, next slide, please.

Curriculum abetted assessments are situated within an assessment framework that includes both standardized assessments like Smarter Balanced Assessment and MAP, which provide highly reliable data for system-wide accountability and board reporting.

This also has shorter cycle teacher administrative assessments such as DIBELS and curriculum-bedded assessments that help schools and teachers monitor progress to inform their instruction.

So standards, we have annual assessments, quarterly assessments, and then we have the shorter cycle assessments.

Next slide, please.

We'll now turn our attention to the third grade reading goal and we'll take this opportunity to summarize information from the last two reporting windows before we share the work that we've done to respond to the data that we shared in December.

For the SBA data, our top line goal is strongly suggestive that our literacy strategies are working both system wide and for students at our targeted schools.

However, our fall map data projects that our scores for African American male students and students of color will be lower in the spring than in years past.

In response, we're taking steps to close those gaps and help students catch back up and are excited to share with you how we're doing that through curriculum-embedded assessments and other initiatives.

Slide eight, please.

Let's recall the top-line SBA data that we reviewed in October.

One of the key takeaways from that review was that SPS has been outperforming Washington State from the start of the pandemic until now, and that trend accelerated in the past year.

Reading rates declined less than SPS and have been improving faster than other districts after returning from remote instruction.

This is true for both African-American male students and all students.

In 2019, SPS outperformed the state by 10%.

Now we outperformed the state by 15%.

Similarly, when we looked to compare our own schools to one another, we saw that our target schools were achieving bigger gains for African American males and students of color.

We are excited to begin applying these lessons learned in our targeted schools in our next strategic plan.

I think this might be a good place to break and then we'll come back.

We will head back up to the dais.

I really appreciate board directors being flexible and taking a brain break as we move to public testimony because folks are here and excited to hear from them.

All right.

we are now going to be moving to public testimony board procedure 1430 bp provides our rules for testimony the board expects the same standard of civility for those participating in public comment as the board expects of itself as board president i have the right and will interrupt any speaker who fails to observe the standard of civility required by our procedure A SPEAKER WHO REFUSES OR FAILS TO COMPLY WITH THESE GUIDELINES OR WHO OTHERWISE SUBSTANTIALLY DISRUPTS THE ORDERLY OPERATION OF THIS MEETING MAY BE ASKED TO LEAVE.

I'M NOW GOING TO PASS IT TO STAFF TO SUMMARIZE A FEW ADDITIONAL POINTS AND THEN READ OFF THE TESTIMONY SPEAKERS.

THANK YOU, PRESIDENT TOP.

THE BOARD WILL TAKE TESTIMONY TODAY FROM THOSE ON THE TESTIMONY LIST AND GO TO THE WAITING LIST IF WE ARE MISSING SPEAKERS.

PLEASE WAIT UNTIL CALL TO APPROACH THE PODIUM OR UNMUTE AND ONLY ONE PERSON MAY SPEAK AT A TIME.

THE BOARD PROCEDURE PROVIDES THAT MOST OF YOUR TIME SHOULD BE SPENT ON THE TOPIC YOU SIGNED UP TO SPEAK TO.

SPEAKERS MAY SEE THEIR TIME TO ANOTHER PERSON BUT THIS MUST BE DONE WHEN THE LISTED SPEAKER IS CALLED.

TIME ISN'T RESTARTED AND THE TOTAL TIME REMAINS TWO MINUTES.

The timer at the podium will indicate the time remaining for speakers here in person.

When the light is red and a beep sounds, it means that your time has already been exhausted and the next speaker will be called.

For those joining by phone, the beep will be the indication that the time has been exhausted.

Moving, also one more note, we do have a Spanish language interpreter joining with us today if they're in the room at this point.

Do we have our interpreter in the room yet?

I believe they will be joining us shortly.

Moving into our list now, for those joining by phone, please press star six to unmute on the conference line.

And for everyone, please do reintroduce yourself when called, as I will mispronounce some names as we move through the list.

The first speaker today is Arthur Nesmonen, who will be followed by Jessica Chong, and then Brent Warnus.

Hello, my name is Arthur and I've been part of Cascadia's HC program since 2022. I remember being so bored in my old school that I felt like I was wasting my time every day.

Once I joined the HC cohort, everything changed.

School became exciting and I loved learning again.

My little brother Dimitri worked incredibly hard so he could have the same experience.

He scored in the top 1% nationally in both math and reading.

But just when he qualified, they started phasing out the HC program.

It feels really unfair that he won't get the same chance I had.

I know firsthand how frustrating it is to sit in a class where you're not challenged.

Nobody should have to go through that.

I'm asking you to please pause sunsetting the HC program at Cascadia until there's a real equivalent option at our neighborhood schools.

Dimitri and every kid who works that hard deserves the same opportunity I've been lucky enough to have.

Thank you.

Next is Jessica Chong.

Hi, I have a first grader at Bryant Elementary and I'm begging the board to pause closure of ACC schools until SPS can prove that equivalent enrichment acceleration programs exist at every neighborhood school.

SPS defines high cap students as those showing knowledge two or more years above grade level.

Decades of research show that most high cap students need both enrichment and acceleration to thrive.

Denying them access to material above grade level is denying them the opportunity to learn and to develop academic grit.

A few schools like mine, Bryant, have enough funding for parent volunteers to provide one hour of grade level enrichment per week.

In other words, high cap students at a few high resource schools spend 30 school hours a week covering material they already knew two years ago and one hour doing activities that may be a little more interesting but are still not challenging.

Even then, many still feel socially isolated because they learn differently than their peers.

This is inequitable and it's not a replacement for the cohort program.

Bryant is a great school, the teachers are amazing, but even they told us SPS's math curriculum lacks differentiation and they can only sprinkle in a little grade level enrichment via UDL.

Even level reading groups only cover grade level material.

When a high cap student finishes their assignments early, they're given a device for screen time for grade level enrichment in a poorly designed app.

School administration has told parents that SPS banned acceleration because despite the research, SPS claims that most high cap students are best taught at grade level only.

As a result, all accelerated services like walk to math, clustered classrooms, and even cross classroom clusters are banned across the district because they provide acceleration above grade level.

If cohort schools stop enrolling new classes, SPS has no alternative for educating high cap students.

This is why 42% of current SPS families are considering leaving SPS due to high cap service changes, when we need to grow enrollment.

The thousands of SPS high cap students bring in the same amount of state funding for basic education as their peers, and Washington state law defines that as acceleration and enrichment for high cap.

If SPS does not suspend closure, it will be failing its duty to provide a basic education for this year's students and classes to come.

next speaker is brent wernus brent wernus after brent will be tau fan and then lillian adams i cede my time to leanne thompson

Good afternoon my name is Leanne Thompson.

Under Washington law SPS is mandated to provide access to accelerated learning and enhanced instruction for highly capable students.

By sunsetting the HCC program before implementing neighborhood school services SPS is harming all of our students.

SPS claims that these services are being provided in neighborhood schools, but that is false.

For example, I have a sixth grader who's highly capable and he is not receiving any accelerated learning because the district implemented a policy that access to advanced math is restricted to students who came from a pathway elementary school.

All other highly capable students are now placed in general education classrooms receiving no accelerated learning and no enhanced instruction.

After reaching out to Senator Peterson for help on this topic, I did receive an email from someone at the district acknowledging SPS's legal obligation to provide these services, and in that email he stated, and I quote, we are currently planning to implement these services in students' home schools.

In other words, these services have not been implemented, and these students are not receiving their basic education.

I followed up asking for a timeline of when these services would be implemented and what resources will be given to our wonderful administrators and teachers who will provide these services.

I was faced with radio silence.

Until SPS has a real working alternative that is both pedagogically sound and in line with our state legislature's intentions for highly capable students, SPS is failing all of our students.

Thank you.

The next speaker is Tal Phan.

Hello, members of the board.

My name is Tao Fan, and I'm the proud parent of a third grader at Cascadia, Carter, and two little ones who we plan to be part of SPS.

I'm also a lifelong SPS student.

I grew up as an immigrant, the child of parents who didn't speak English, and I know firsthand what it means to rely on public schools to provide opportunities beyond my home.

Troy schools and programs like International Baccalaureate changed the trajectory of my education, giving me access to a learning environment that met me where I was.

I returned to Seattle with my own children believing in SPS.

But now I find myself standing here disheartened because that vision of public education, the one that lifts all children by meeting their diverse needs, is fading.

I know this board has long been against a highly capable cohort and I understand the concerns.

But what I don't understand is why are we choosing to dismantle highly capable before we built the infrastructure to replace it?

Why are we rushing to close the door without making sure another one is open?

What's being done in the name of equity is actually pulling the rug from under our children.

Carter, a first-generation, biracial Vietnamese American, struggled at his neighborhood school because his academic needs weren't met.

I asked how he could be challenged at three different schools he attended, and multiple teachers across those schools told me, we don't have the bandwidth.

This is a tragedy not just for students who deserve to be met at their level, but for teachers who are already stretched so thin.

And it leaves me wondering, is the board truly listening to these teachers and parents or are they turning a blind eye?

We have seen this story unfold in other districts when programs like this are removed without a functioning alternative.

Families leave the district because they feel forced to.

I'm here not to fight an impossible battle.

I understand the larger decision may have already been made, but I'm asking you to pause.

Give SPS the time to prove that an alternative model can work.

Thank you.

The next speaker is Lillian Adams.

After Lillian Adams will be Annie Kage and then Lily Stivers.

Good evening.

My name is Lillian Adams and I'm an eighth grader at Madison Middle School.

I'm here tonight to speak to you about the necessity of libraries and their librarians and public schools.

I'll begin by asking, what is a library?

The definition given by a dictionary would be a building or room containing collections of books, periodicals, and sometimes films and recorded music for people to read, borrow, or refer to.

Though that sounds quite boring, doesn't it?

As I have found over the years, libraries are so much more than simply a room that holds books for public usage.

They allow us to step into the world of opportunities that differ from ours.

They offer insight to the complexities of others' lives and experiences.

However, embedded within the definition that I shared previously, libraries cannot live up to their full potential without the people who bring the space to life.

Librarians are the glue that holds the vines of the books together, the blood that works to keep the library's heart pumping day in and day out.

As my time as a middle schooler comes to a close, I can say one thing for certain.

I may not have made it through without the presence of my school's beloved library and librarian.

Throughout the hardest points of my time in middle school, my librarian and the library have always given me a place where I feel like I belong.

She's not only Madison Middle School's librarian, she's a mentor, she's a counselor.

My librarian is the one person in the building that knows everyone's name.

I can't begin to imagine what school would be like every day without the radiating joy that our library admits to every passerby.

As Albert Einstein once said, the only thing that you absolutely have to know is the location of the library.

It would be absolutely devastating for Seattle Public Schools to lose their library and librarians.

Before we go to our next speaker, I'm going to invite our interpreter to the podium real quickly just to introduce themselves for anyone who may be here in person who has requested Spanish language interpretation.

So our interpreter can flag that they're here.

And then I know we also had somebody who was joining by phone requesting interpretation.

Hi.

Wilson Jones, can we also get the screen up here turned on so we can see?

Sorry, go ahead.

My name is Jairo Weyman.

I'm going to be interpreting tonight for Spanish.

And do you want to make the announcement in Spanish real quick, too?

Thank you.

The next speaker is Annie Kagey.

Good afternoon.

Thanks for the opportunity to leave work early today and speak with you.

My name is Annie and I have a third grader at Cascadia Elementary.

Alder has a creative, curious, exciting, and sometimes seemingly sleepless brain.

His interest in learning new things is full throttle from early morning until he closes his book or math activity books and lights out.

He was too nervous to be here today, so I'm speaking on his behalf.

His beautiful active brain is also an anxious one, and one prone to depression and sensory overload.

Even at an early age, we've started to see this.

He's been incredibly fortunate that the community of Cascadia has been there for the last three years to support him.

Not only has the school from grade one helped him thrive in his neurodiversity, the teachers and staff have celebrated who he is and his thirst for learning with academic challenge, cultural learning opportunities, and mental health counseling.

Ever since Alder's Seattle preschool program teacher sent him home with chapter books at age four to read to himself, I knew I had an important job ahead to keep him engaged and interested.

His kindergarten teacher, superhero Ms. Fuller, who's now my daughter's kindergarten teacher at Olympic Hills, recommended that we consider HC services for Alder at Cascadia for first grade in order to meet his behavioral, neurological, and learning needs.

I acknowledge the equity gaps in accessing highly capable services, and I completely understand the district's goals to provide services in neighborhood schools.

I fully support that goal and agree with the equity goals.

However, we have not seen this implemented in the local school, and there are other kids that, as others mentioned, are considering leaving the district, looking at Shoreline, or possibly even moving to Cascadia for those who are in third to fifth.

So I ask that you consider keeping important learning and development opportunities open to young learners.

Please enroll a second grade class next year at Cascadia.

Thank you.

The next speaker is Lily Stivers.

Lily Stivers.

Hi, I'm Lily Stivers, a sixth grader from Madison Middle School.

When I saw the Madison Middle School Library for the first time, my jaw dropped.

There were so many books and so many great reading spaces.

Now I go to the library every day.

It's one of my favorite places in the whole school and for many other students as well.

A full-time librarian provides a safe and open space for all students to go to whenever they need it.

The lunchroom and classrooms can be a very chaotic space.

I get overstimulated sometimes, especially at lunch where it is too loud.

When this happens, I know I can go to the library where it is calm and quiet.

This is why the library is so important and everyone has a quiet and calm space where they can go to learn at any time.

If the library is closed, where do we go?

Another thing, school classes give you the basic math, science, history, but the library gives you different perspectives.

The books there teach you about the bigger world and not just numbers and formulas.

Through the books I've read in our library, I have learned about wars, what it's like to be in someone else's situation that is very different from my own, and the mistakes that people have made and that we can all learn from.

Cutting the library to half time is cutting my education.

Because the library is always open, I have read more books this year than ever.

Reading has improved my vocabulary, my writing, my comprehension of text, and my spelling.

My librarian is also a very great librarian.

We have book talks where we can talk about our favorite books and get other interested in books.

It is a place where we can share ideas, make friends, and grow as kids.

Hear me out as just a student who wants a good school experience.

It is very important that everyone has a space to go to anytime, and that space in our school is the library.

Thank you for your time.

The next speaker is Leah Zainab Aljawad.

um libraries have had a huge impact on my life during ramadan i have been able to go to the library during lunch because no one wants to be around that much food when you can't eat i've made friends by talking about books and found a community in our book club but the library isn't just a place to read when we need replacement laptops we go to the library because the tech people are only at my school four days a week for three hours each We have yarn for knitting and crocheting and art and beading on certain days.

There are board games and Legos and so many community building activities.

LA teachers hold classes in the library and so many people look forward to them.

Currently, we have an event called Blind Date with a Book and I've tried books that I've never thought I would ever read.

Personally, I read books super fast.

I'm in the library as many days as I can before school.

If I couldn't go to the library, I wouldn't have enough books to read.

but everyone should have access to books.

Knowledge is power and schools are meant to help us succeed.

Libraries should stay open because they're a fundamental part of our education.

The next speaker is Chris Jackins.

Chris Jackins will be followed by Dr. Elizabeth Ramirez-Ariola.

And after that, we will have Hans Kell.

My name is Chris Jackins, box 84063, Seattle 98124. On the personnel report, under separations, the report lists Executive Director of Coordinated School Health, Pat Sander.

I wish to thank Ms. Sander for her service to the district and many roles over a number of decades.

On the approval of the Kimball Elementary project settlement agreement to pay $1.5 million to cornerstone general contractors, two points.

Number one, putting this item in the consent agenda without discussion does not give a proper public accounting of what is going on.

Number two, it seems likely that there were other district legal costs associated with producing the settlement which are not referenced in the report.

Please vote no.

On the $13.4 million Phoenix contract related to SAP cloud enterprise resource planning, can the contract be canceled if breaches of employee and other data occur related to the system, as has recently occurred on other district computer systems?

On my opposition to Proposition 2, the BEX 6 capital levy on the February 11th ballot, four points.

Number one, I oppose school closures, and Prop 2 mega-sized schools mean more school closures.

Number two, the Seattle Times editorial board raised serious doubts about Prop 2. Number three, three parents wrote an op-ed in the Seattle Times opposing Prop 2, raising issues including that it would be better to spread out capital levy money.

for maintenance at many more schools.

Number four, the district should keep these concerns in mind.

I would suggest after the rest of public testimony, it's been great stuff, all of you are great, that you take a break and sit down and chat with these people that are right here.

I've heard a lot of them before.

You need to just settle some of this stuff.

Thank you very much.

Next speaker is Dr. Elizabeth Ramirez-Arella.

Hello, I am Dr. Elizabeth Ramirez Arriola, a parent of a middle schooler attending sixth grade at Eckstein Middle School.

I am here today to discuss multicultural community experiences engaging with our school system and the impact on student success.

Communities of color have been historically underserved and disenfranchised, particularly those with language barriers.

Students of color graduate at lower percentages compared to their white peers.

Many college students are not prepared to succeed in the more demanding college courses, and I know this because I am a college professor.

In addition, students of color are underrepresented and highly capable, as shown in today's highly capable update.

It is worth acknowledging that two of the priorities of the current strategic plan are highly quality instruction and learning experiences, inclusive and authentic engagement.

However, materials of the enrollment study presentation show the number one motivator for families to live This is directly connected to the district's leadership's ability to protest towards meeting school board goals.

One proposed exploration area is why students of color live at a high rate.

This is directly connected to the school district engages with community of color.

Therefore, I urge the school board as our elected officials and community representatives to discuss publicly and openly in the superintendent contract extension before your vote whether the strategic plan goals or guard rails have been honored and what the path forward for our district it is you owe that to the school communities and to the students thank you the next speaker is hans kell after hans will be julie schneider schneider and then stacia bell

I'm Hans Kael, a parent at Bryant and a proud alum of Washington Middle School.

Thank you for finally launching highly capable universal screening.

But while this opens an important door towards equity, the benefits of high cap are being removed, shutting the door to advancement.

At SPS Sunset's high cap cohort schools, the new high cap service model forbids above grade level instruction for all future students.

While universal screening will lead to more diverse representative high cap identification, THOSE IDENTIFIED WON'T RECEIVE THE SAME EDUCATIONAL BENEFITS.

THESE BENEFICIARIES OF UNIVERSAL SCREENING WILL BE RIGHT TO WONDER WHAT'S THE POINT OF BEING SCREENED?

WE ALL DESERVE AN ANSWER TO THAT QUESTION.

In SPS's new high-cap approach, even when students demonstrate clear mastery of grade-level content, teachers are stopped from accelerating beyond it because what SPS calls accelerated learning excludes and forbids above-grade-level instruction.

So even excellent teachers at well-run schools like Bryant can't challenge kids that way.

This isn't just happening to my child at Bryant.

It's district-wide.

Only cohort schools allow above-grade-level instruction.

It's why families are so desperate to keep them.

this change hurts those furthest from educational justice i'm the child of an immigrant mom and a dad who never graduated high school i entered sps's 1980s version of high cap then u-dub at age 13. that wouldn't have happened save for access to above grade level instruction at sps removing that access only harms kids without alternatives my family had few alternatives when i was in sps but my kids have plenty now because of the sps education i received Your survey shows 42% of all students are considering leaving SPS due to the changes to high cap.

This is a preventable own goal.

Dr. Jones, I believe you also received above grade level instruction from SPS.

I implore you, don't shut the door behind you.

Universal screening opens doors.

Don't close them by sunsetting cohort schools unless neighborhood schools can provide above grade level instruction.

Thank you.

The next speaker is Julie Schneider.

Good afternoon, my name is Julie Schneider and I'm an SPS parent of three kids.

I'm here today with the Seattle Student Options Coalition, a growing group of parents from across the city who are concerned that the district is mismanaging student enrollment to the detriment of option schools and the entire system.

In December, parents in our coalition filed a formal complaint to the SPS ombudsperson about concerns with enrollment practices for this school year.

The district responded without any substantive action to our concern.

Our complaint and the district's responses are on our website, seattlestudentoptions.org.

Open enrollment is meant to give an opportunity for children to attend a public school that can effectively meet their needs.

Unfortunately, the district's current processes contributes to enrollment loss, worsening the budget deficit.

To strengthen the entire SPS system, the district must focus on enrolling students who want to enroll.

Instead, families have been turned away from SPS due to lack of option school enrollment.

For this school year, the district did not assign more than 800 elementary and K-8 students to the school of their choice, despite the fact that these schools had room to accommodate many more students.

Further, these schools appear to have been intentionally under enrolled when compared with the district's purple book and building capacity.

I personally was in touch with 27 wait-listed families this summer.

Some had children who were not enrolled at their choice school even when an older sibling was already there.

Others opted for homeschooling or private school because weeks and months of not knowing if a spot would be offered was too stressful for the family.

The district's current approach to enrollment is misguided, short-sighted, and unacceptable.

All children who want to attend SPS should be enrolled.

This is your job to work on behalf of all children who have a right to access public schools.

The next speaker is Stacia Bell.

After Stacia will be Alex Nesmonen and then Matt Sussman.

My name is Stacia Bell and I cede my time to SPS parent Michelle Whalen.

Hello.

I took the time to research each of you, and you're all wonderfully accomplished and well-educated.

Each of you has worked very hard to get where you are today, and in your path to this place here, is a unifying experience you share, not just with the people in the room, but also everyone outside.

You went to the library.

From childhood on, the library was there for you, but a library alone is like a bunch of raw ingredients.

Sure, you can do some things on your own, but it is librarians who help you turn those ingredients into a meal, a meal that can feed you for the rest of your life.

I encourage the board to not approve a budget that cuts librarians because of the harm it will do to our students.

It also goes directly against your 2025-2030 proposed guardrails number one and five, which relate to access to high-quality educational opportunities and the allocation of resources matching student need.

How can we start the year knowing you've crashed through two of the five protective barriers?

To cut librarians amounts to $2.7 million.

It may seem like a lot, but that amounts to just .216 of the budget.

not even a quarter of 1%.

Yet in that .216 part of the budget, librarians add value to every aspect of student life with educational resources, teacher support, community connections, life skills, and giving kids a place to belong and feel safe, which we need now more than ever.

Choosing a budget that doesn't cut librarians means, as my child, who fiercely loves her Madison Middle School librarian, said it best, you're keeping such a big thing for such a little amount.

Thank you.

Next is Alex Nesmonen.

Hello, I'm Alex Nesmonen speaking for my son's Arthur Nine.

Dimitri, seven.

Arthur was bored and miserable at our neighborhood school until Cascadia HC reignited his passion for learning.

When we realized that Dimitri would have similar struggles in the neighborhood school, we gave him a path to HC, work hard.

And so he did.

He scored 99th percentile in both math and reading and was excited to join his brother the following year.

Then, last spring, I found out that first grade of HC won't exist in Cascadia.

This was a shock.

I was relieved due to a promise that local neighborhood schools would fill the gap by having their own AC equivalent programs.

But the more I talked to parents, caught hotlines, and talked to various teachers, the more it became apparent that no one really knew what AC at his school would look like.

The best answer I received was that each class would have a dedicated corner with a table where advanced material would be, and so kids could come over and help themselves, if they choose to.

This was very unsatisfactory, and by no means, Cascadia is the equivalent.

So I decided to put anecdotes aside and go to the source, go talk to the principal.

From him, I finally got a reliable, realistic answer.

HC program would be implemented in the form of a student can ask their teacher to take extra homework home if they choose to.

Does that sound HC equivalent?

No, of course it doesn't.

In an America who's not from the US, one thing I deeply admire here is the principle that promises come with accountability.

Dimitri feels left down after all his hard work and he's not alone.

Many kids are missing out on the challenging, fulfilling education they were told that they would receive.

I respectfully ask you to please pause the sunset of the HC program at Cascadia until you genuinely implement comparable advanced learning opportunities in our neighborhood schools.

Please don't let these children's aspirations and hard work go unfulfilled.

Thank you.

Next is Matt Sussman.

After Matt will be Stephanie Govian and then Jen Elliott Blake.

I'm a parent of two children, my son, currently thriving at Cascadia, and my daughter, a kindergartner, already reading chapter books and doing second grade math.

She may be denied the same opportunity due to the sunsetting of the HCC program.

I'm not just speaking for my family.

I represent the majority of parents who believe in educational opportunities and appropriate academic challenges for all students.

We will no longer be silent.

The enrollment study shows 58% of current SPS families have considered leaving the district over concerns about educational quality.

Parents want and expect that their children will be challenged appropriately.

What strikes me most is the disconnect between what's working and what's being dismantled.

Cascadia exceeded enrollment projections this year by over 120 students.

The school has become increasingly diverse with the majority of students now being children of color.

This is a success story.

of equity and excellence that we should be building upon, not ending.

I heard you, Dr. Jones, acknowledge the major gaps in implementing HC services at neighborhood schools.

Yet instead of addressing these gaps, first, we're rushing to sunset a program that's serving our community well.

As I watch my daughter's hunger for learning outpace her class, this feels like demolishing a bridge before building its replacement.

The board's mission is to serve all students, right?

By eliminating HCC without a proven alternative in place, you're not advancing equity.

You're creating a system where only families who can afford private tutoring and enrichment programs will be able to access accelerated learning.

Is that the outcome that you want?

I respectfully ask you to pause the sunsetting of HCC until there was a real functional alternative in our neighborhood schools.

Keep Pascadia open for grades two through five.

This isn't about my daughter only, it's about maintaining a pathway for all Seattle students.

I'm going to ask you to please conclude your remarks.

Each of you chose to serve on this board to make a positive difference in children's lives.

Tonight, you have the chance to fulfill that commitment.

Do the job you were elected to do.

The next speaker is Stephanie Govian.

The next speaker is Stephanie Govian.

I cede my time to Heather Hewlett.

Hi, I just want to start by thanking you all for being here and listening to us.

And a lot of us are saying kind of the same thing, so I'll try to be, you know.

I think what most of us want is to make sure that we're heard and that so many of us, we're actually really excited about the neighborhood schools.

And my son's story is that he started kindergarten in an SPS neighborhood school with a severe speech impediment.

and his speech teacher was wonderful and got him to a really functioning student level and we fell in love with our neighborhood school and tried to stay as long as we could but he kept acting out and getting more and more bored and frustrated and his big love is math and we said well focus on learning how to read and then you know like you have to qualify if you want to go to a different school and even though it was a difficult decision he decided to leave his friends behind he's neurodivergent it was difficult to do and the first couple months were a little bit of a struggle but he went from crying yelling screaming every night saying that he hated school saying that it was boring saying that a waste of time that it was baby math everything I did with the principal and the teachers were trying to help but they were limited They said that there's a ceiling in place you are not allowed to learn above grade level curriculum, and it broke his heart.

But he's at an HCC school this year.

Sorry, I'm tearing up.

He's happy every day.

Every day is awesome.

Every day is fantastic.

And his best friend won't come because his sister is a first-grader, and she can't go with her brother.

So they're all staying behind.

And Riker graduated from his speech therapy, but there are so many kids who are highly capable but have IEPs, so they can't leave their schools.

And I just ask you, please, think of us.

Think before sunsetting the program, because it means so much.

Thanks.

Next is Jen Elliott Blake.

Jen Elliott Blake.

Hello, my name is Jen Elliott Blake and I am a parent of two children who are enrolled in Seattle Public Schools.

My youngest child was granted the opportunity to attend the SPP Plus preschool program after I advocated for him to receive early evaluation by this school district.

This year as a kindergartner with an IEP, he is thriving in ways that were only made possible through this early intervention and his ability to have access to unique education services.

I'm grateful this district allowed me as his parents advocate on his behalf.

On the other hand, and in stark contrast, my eldest child's unique learning needs are being disregarded by this district.

He has qualified for advanced learning services since his first opportunity to test into them many years ago.

This district chose to shutter my child's only reasonable access to an HCC school in West and South Seattle before they even had a plan in place to provide advanced learning services in his neighborhood school.

He has received little to no advanced learning support in the past four years at his neighborhood school, even despite my attempts as his parent to advocate for these needs.

My third grader, who once had a joy for learning and was eager and excited to go to school, is bored and unchallenged.

He started being bullied this year and has lost his drive for learning.

Our family doesn't have the financial means to place him in private school or to move quote, moved to another city as was suggested by a member of this district's advanced learning staff.

This district is currently providing no support, funding, or training to allow our teachers to support these unique students and is in turn failing and neglecting thousands of children around Seattle.

I know you will hear from a lot of parents in the North on this issue tonight, but I want you to know there are parents like me who reside in West and South Seattle and are just as disappointed and frustrated that this school district is choosing to restrict our children from having access to learning opportunities to allow them to thrive and reach their greatest potential.

I ask this district and this board, please allow me to successfully advocate for the unique learning needs of my oldest child, just as I have done for my youngest child.

Allow me to advocate for all of the children in the school district who qualify for and deserve advanced learning.

Their unique learning needs matter too.

Thank you for your time.

The next speaker is Gloria Ramirez.

Gloria Ramirez.

Is she going to be on the phone or person?

She had indicated in person.

Do we have Gloria here in the room?

I believe Gloria is on the phone now.

Gloria, you'll need to press star six.

We do have an interpreter in the room who can provide you instructions as well.

And we will extend the testimony time to allow for interpretation.

Hello.

Hola, ¿qué tal?

Hola, me escucho.

Buenas tardes, Gloria.

Voy a ser su traductor el día de hoy.

Si gusta hablar frase por frase, yo le puedo traducir aquí con las personas que están acá, ¿vale?

Hi, my name is Gloria Ramirez.

I'm a parent of a child here in the Seattle School District.

I come here with a respectful petition.

Asking for information that is available beforehand at the right time, so it's also in Spanish?

Or in different languages?

So there's many times where we get this information from other sources like social media but not from the district directly in our own language.

And such important matters as programs being shut down.

And this is institutional racism not to have this information in a timely manner and through the right channels.

A lot of times our children are forced to leave schools because they are forced to work, especially with the high rises of mostly everything here in Seattle.

So therefore we need more support for our communities for these young kids to continue school.

Yeah, that's all she has to say.

Thank you very much.

The next speaker is Yana Parker.

Yana Parker

We can hear you.

Hello?

We can hear you.

Go ahead.

Good evening.

My name is Yana Parker, president of the Seattle Special Education PTSA.

I am both an advocate supporting families across the district and a parent of twice exceptional children, students who are highly capable and have disabilities.

I want to address key concerns about information that will be shared in tonight's presentation.

What highly capable services exist?

are few and not equitably accessible.

The data is incomplete on math and ELA goals and lacking whether students with disabilities were also BIPOC.

there is no student and family feedback on how things are going according to the slide during the 2023-2024 school year the district provided direct programming and staff development in universal design for learning and differentiation it is if this professional development is continuing the school year families are seeing little or little of it or And I can attest as a parent, these practices are not meaningfully and consistently implemented across the district.

Lack of consistent standards for all schools means students are significantly uh have the significantly different experiences that is inequitable it should it should not depend on the school for the students to receive the high quality services they need the that includes students um no matter what their needs are special education highly capable multilingual and other one major program a problem is the reliance on each school's c-step um it creates for implementation of highly capable services.

It creates district-wide inconsistency and risks non-compliance with the state law.

For example, we don't see any highly capable services available across multiple subjects.

In some schools, the only advanced class is math, and that's only in eighth grade for a few schools.

The district is not meeting its legal obligation to develop high school and beyond plans and align them with transition plans.

Parents and students report that they're being unaware of having- Ms.

Parker, I'm going to ask you to conclude your remarks.

Okay, I'm just saying that I'm going to submit the whole testimony in writing, but I will say that parents and students report that they are not aware of high schools and beyond plans, or the high school and beyond plan is developed after the secondary transition plan.

I will submit the rest of my testimony in writing.

Thank you.

The next speaker is Helen Lundell.

I'm Helen Lundell and I cede my time to Christine.

Hi, I'm Christine Highlander.

I'm a psychiatric nurse practitioner and an SPS parent with children in my neighborhood elementary and middle school by way of Decatur.

Today I would like to share with you about the importance of HCC schools as it relates to SPS's policy 3420 regarding student behavior and disciplinary responses.

Highly capable and twice exceptional kids are commonly known for their asynchronous brain development, meaning their brain formation is often spent on greater cognitive connectivity with relatively delayed social or emotional connectivity.

These kids don't know that their brains are wired differently, but it shows up in the classroom in ways like having a tangential thought to a science question and getting out of their seat to start messing with materials that aren't part of the experiment, blurting out in class, or fidgeting in their seat when they get done with a worksheet while their peers are still working.

When not in an environment filled with other highly capable learners, they are more likely to experience behavioral issues, which you've heard about from other parents, and you can see from SPS's own data.

Across the district, the proportion of HC kids subject to disciplinary action is second only to students with disabilities.

In any given neighborhood elementary school, the proportion of HC kids who are disciplined is commonly seven to 20 times higher than the general student body, while at HC schools, the disciplinary rates are the same as the district's average.

In middle schools where HC was phased out years ago and the district promised other opportunities to support learning, the discipline disparity also exists.

HC kids are more frequently disciplined than most other demographic groups at five of the eight middle schools that were never HC pathway schools, and the discipline rates of HC kids is notably lower at the middle schools that were previously HCC.

These numbers are not evidence of unruly students but rather of a district that does not provide enough academic rigor to HC students in neighborhood schools and a district that is not providing training to teachers on how to work with highly capable learners at a behavioral level.

I urge you to consider that maintaining the HCC program is part of the foundation of the district 3420 policy regarding effective and engaging instruction and behavior management that are foundational to reducing behavioral violations.

Thank you.

The next speaker is Aura Natalia Mutrago-Rivero.

And Aura, we do have a Spanish language interpreter with us who will provide instructions for testimony.

Aura, we do have a Spanish language interpreter with us who will provide instructions for testimony.

Aura, we do have a Spanish language interpreter with us who will provide instructions for testimony.

Good afternoon.

My name is Natalia Mutrago.

I'm a mother of children here in the Seattle School District.

I'm thankful and grateful for this opportunity to be listened.

And I would like you all to pay attention to what I'm about to tell you.

The district hasn't been knowledgeable of people like me that have barriers with language.

They have made our participation in decision making mostly to be null.

Especially important decisions that definitely affect my community and my family.

Especially closing down schools like immersion schools that are at risk as well.

Very important decisions that are taken without having our participation or taking us for these matters.

She would like to know if for the upcoming meeting with the superintendent, it will be discussed on how it is dealt with these issues with the community that presents language barriers.

I would really like for them to be honest, for them to recognize their mistakes, and for us to be able to learn from them as well.

Above everything, I would really like for them to find a way or a solution for us to keep communicated and for our community to be also involved in these sort of decisions that are really important.

Especially in these moments that are really difficult for our families and our students as well.

I'm grateful for your attention and have a good day.

Thank you.

The next speaker is Michael Tarantino.

After Michael will be Manuela Sly and then Janice White.

A decision to close the highly capable cohort would be counterproductive and contrary to SPS's goals.

It's perplexing, especially when one considers the positive impacts these cohorts have on our students.

In these settings, students are not only appropriately challenged but also thrive, having previously struggled in neighborhood schools where they felt unsupported and bored.

The need to preserve HCC might be less acute if, in fact, neighborhood schools were providing meaningful differentiation and enrichment.

but they are not.

Consider, for example, the experience of my friend's first grade child, identified as HC, who receives a mere 30 minutes of enrichment activities per week at Loyal Heights.

The rest of his time is spent revisiting material he's already mastered, leading to a growing dislike of school, disengagement with his teachers and classmates, and disruptive behavior affecting the entire class.

I do not fault the intentions of the teachers, but the truth is that differentiated learning simply is not happening.

And turning a blind eye to this reality is the opposite of equity and inclusion.

Were it not for HCC, my own son, a current third grader who started at Cascadia this year, would be similarly left behind.

Instead, he is thriving.

He is in a school that is far more diverse than our neighborhood school and is surrounded by kids who share his capabilities and motivations.

He is pushed in ways that simply were not feasible before, and he is learning how to enjoy being challenged when at his neighborhood school he barely had to try.

Why dismantle a program that is working when the alternative is so clearly not?

It's not a problem of capacity, quite the opposite.

With no school closures slated for next year, dismantling HCC will leave a gorgeous new building like Cascadia's woefully underutilized and with a shrinking student body.

Keeping HCC in place makes sense.

It's good for the students, it's good for the schools, and it aligns with the board's goals and priorities.

In the stated alternative, differentiation and enrichment either isn't viable or isn't materializing, but either way it isn't working.

Our children shouldn't be forced to ride it out in the meantime when the HCC program has worked and can continue to work.

The next speaker is Manuela Sly.

Hello, my name is Manuela Slai.

I cede my time to student Isaac Naranjo Lopez.

Hello, my name is Isaac and I'm an eighth grader at Denny International Middle School.

I am here to talk to you about concerns I have for my safety and my classmates' safety at school and outside of school.

First, I have to talk about ICE.

There are many students who are not able to focus on their studies because they're afraid of going home and their parents or guardians won't be there because they've been taken away by ICE.

They are afraid of this even if their family members are here legally.

They worry their loved ones could be targeted by ICE because of the way they look.

I've heard stories about kids who go home and their parents aren't there.

Then families get separated and it makes it so hard.

It makes me shake to think about it.

Last week, many students were part of the day without immigrants boycott.

My classmates and I made up posters to put around our schools about the importance of immigrants in our country and our schools.

We need more education in schools about our rights and what to do if we get in a situation with ICE.

The second thing I'd like to talk about is about transportation.

I live right on the edge of the two mile range so I don't qualify for a school bus.

I wouldn't mind walking but my area is not safe because there's always something going on.

Where I live there have been shootings, people doing drugs, and kids getting jumped.

This happens when it's dark and in broad daylight.

It scares me and my family for my safety.

There is a bus that goes right by my house, but it won't stop for me and the other students who live near.

We need more flexible transportation so students feel safe going to school, and please help us solve this problem.

Thank you.

The next speaker is Janice White.

After Janice White will be Erin Combs, and if we have both Janice and Erin today, that will be our final speaker.

Hi, I'm Janice White.

I'm the parent of three SPS graduates.

With respect to the enrollment study, there was a Seattle Times article on April 15th, 2024, that said that SPS was planning to use its grant from the state to conduct a survey to help understand why families have opted out or not enrolled their students in SPS.

I'm puzzled as to why 1,015 interviews out of 1,420 were of adults of current students and only 300 interviews were of adults of former students and only 105 interviews were of adults of students who've never attended SPS, and I hope you ask about this.

Regarding HCC, in 2021, the plan for changing the model of highly capable services stated that staff were working on how 2E or twice exceptional students would be served.

And 2E students, as you've heard, are students with high cognitive abilities who also have a disability.

And the plan said that there might be a need for a cohort model for this group of students to be served effectively.

But since then, the community has heard nothing, and there's no mention of 2E students in the PowerPoint attached to the agenda for today's presentation.

I've testified before about this, and I'm going to continue to do that because I know from painful personal experience the harm that will be done to students fitting this profile if they're not served appropriately.

My 2E son, now a college sophomore, was considered dangerous as an elementary student because of his behavior.

He wasn't allowed to access advanced academics because he's autistic.

When his academic needs weren't met, his behavior resulted in him being restrained, being put into isolation.

running away from school, having the police called on him, and refusing to attend school for months at a time.

Because of my family's privilege, we were able to sue and get him access to the advanced academics he needed started in seventh grade, and once we did that, he never had another behavioral incident, not one.

Please don't forget this very vulnerable group of students.

Thank you.

The next speaker is Erin Combs.

Erin Combs.

Hi, my name is Erin Combs, and I am a parent of a second grader at Thornton Creek Elementary.

I am one of thousands of parents who actively opposed school closures in the fall when our families endured a grueling and prolonged whiplash as the district moved to close dozens of elementary schools.

At the time, you insisted that the budget deficit was largely due to under-enrolled schools and declining enrollment.

Given that, it is unconscionable to me that the district was knowingly suppressing enrollment at the same time.

You've already heard about the impact advanced learning has on enrollment tonight, so I'm going to tell you at my school.

Thornton Creek had about 450 kids enrolled last year.

In 2024, 75 kids tried to enroll, were wait-listed, but the district simply never enrolled them.

Thornton Creek has a building capacity of 650, so there's certainly space available.

As a result, our enrollment dropped this year to 390. That's a decline of about 15% or 60 kids.

So we became one of those under-enrolled schools, quote unquote, because the district caused us to be under-enrolled.

We also had to cut two full-time staff in October as a result.

My school, unfortunately, is not alone.

More than 800 kids are wait-listed and not enrolled in elementary option schools throughout the city, despite capacity at each one.

I volunteer to help lead school tours, and several parents this year during tours asked if they should even bother applying to Thornton Creek since so many families didn't get in this year.

These are families SPS cannot afford to lose.

As you know, in this state, funding follows the student, so every student not enrolled in SPS makes our budget deficit worse.

Why on earth is the district intentionally preventing families from enrolling at the same time you want to close schools because they are under-enrolled?

I need someone to make this make sense.

Rather than closing or shuttering the most desirable, innovative and effective and inclusive programs and turning more students away, the district must shift its focus to growing enrollment and bringing more families in.

Thank you.

President Topp, that was the 25th speaker for tonight and concludes testimony.

Thank you all.

I appreciate folks giving their time and their feedback this evening on highly capable services, on library services.

I know those are the two topics that my inbox right now sees the most emails from.

And I assume that's similar to other directors here at the dais.

But that concludes our public testimony.

We're going to go back to the table to finish progress monitoring.

And I'm going to hand it over to Brandon for that.

Back to the U.

Oh, do you want to take a break before?

Oh, okay.

We should probably take five minutes.

I've heard we need a break, so we will reconvene at 6.05.

Hi, how are you?

It's good to see you.

How are you doing?

your way back to the table.

We'd greatly appreciate it.

I know these conversations are just so fun.

Alright, I got one.

I got two.

I got three.

Oh, now I'm back to two.

You were first.

Noted.

And appreciated.

Good job.

Alright, I got four.

Just waiting on Director Briggs.

Do we have Evan?

All right.

All right, so we are going to pick up where we left off.

Thank you so much, everybody, for the excellent public testimony.

We sincerely appreciate it.

I will now hand it over to Dr. Jones.

Thank you very much.

Yes, so I want to take an opportunity to get to the meat of what we're talking about.

I had a conversation with President Topp during the break.

And so if we can go to slide 11 and talk about how curriculum embedded assessments drive adult behavior and really dive in right there, that would be helpful.

Okay, so I'm going to ask doctors Perkins and Starosky to kind of lead through this.

This is when we're talking about the implementation and why this is so important.

We've been talking about curriculum embedded assessments and I think there's a piece in here as we talk about the administration of this that would be interesting to the board.

So Dr. Perkins, will you talk about how we implement curriculum embedded assessments and why it's important?

Absolutely, and I'll invite Dr. Strotsky to enhance what I'm sharing.

So this board was very clear at the December update that they wanted to hear the steps we were taking in response to the data, some of the concerns about the fall map data.

And one of the major ways, there's a number of things in the memo I'll just highlight.

We're supporting professional learning communities, working with special ed and multilingual staff.

But one of the key things we're doing district-wide is this effort to have common curriculum-embedded assessments that drive conversations, particularly within professional learning communities of teachers, to say, how do we plan better?

What do we learn from the data that we're getting?

How do we respond in the moment?

How do we answer the question, how are our students doing right now?

And what are we doing about it if they're not meeting particular standards?

And so we have settled on common curriculum embedded assessments in K5 ELA as well as in other areas and other subject areas that I can share.

But in K5 ELA, this has resulted in district-wide conversations that connect right back to the strategic plan in terms of driving adult behavior.

Just yesterday in this very room, we were having conversations with school leaders on the K5 curriculum embedded assessment data and what steps school leaders could take to support their educators support their professional learning communities to plan better so that the next set of lessons and units are effective for students.

And I'm gonna turn to Dr. Strausky to add to that.

So if we're looking at what's the headline for this memo is around curriculum embedded assessments that we had shared previously is that we as an entire system did our first phase, our first implementation of curriculum embedded assessment.

We're right here in the second phase as we're starting to ramp up into the second group of assessments across the district.

And what this is doing is it's allowing us from the practitioner level, and so from the practitioner level, I'm talking from the teacher level, back up to central office, back up to us in this room for our school board.

So how we're specifically using it right now is number one, year one implementation is we're just looking at right now the number, the percentage that we're getting back from schools of students in schools who have actually completed the curriculum embedded assessments.

And so in year one, right now we're at 80%.

When you compare that to any year one implementation systemic-wide, that's a pretty remarkable number.

And you can see it in our memo that we sent to you, specifically around what that compares to with the first year that we did DIBELS, and then the first year that we've done MAP.

So we're way ahead of where we are in the first year implementation, which we are very proud of.

However, where we're doing this at the practitioner level, as Dr. Perkins spoke just yesterday, we're continuing to have monthly meetings with our principals about the implementation of curriculum embedded assessments.

Just like, when and how do you do them?

How's it going?

What are the process improvements that we could be doing?

What are we learning from doing it?

And that we can apply to the second group that we're just about ready to start right now.

So for us, ideally it's to drive instruction, tier one instruction for our students.

Our teachers are using this to help inform their PLCs, their professional learning communities.

Our principals are using it to inform their principal learning networks.

And our regional executive directors are using that to help have focused conversations about how well are our students doing right now and how do we know is where we're going.

Where we're not yet at the point of being able to say, How well are our students doing?

Right now, what we're looking at as a system is how we got the curriculum embedded assessments completed and entered into our system.

Today, Dr. Perkins and I engaged in a call behind the curtain things that most people wouldn't be paying attention to.

And behind the curtain, what I'm talking about is what are the structural movements that our system needs to make in the form of technology and supports across our multiple platforms that we use to be able to enter in these curriculum embedded assessments.

So we're in phase one.

Phase one is now complete.

Phase two, we're moving towards the practitioner level of getting into the things that we're specifically focusing on, PLNs, so principal learning networks, PLCs, that's our professional learning networks for teachers, and using that to drive our professional development with our principals on a monthly basis.

So I think this is an opportunity for us to transition for questions and discussions.

I think this is really around that we wanted to focus on the implementation since we didn't have new data.

I think we heard the desire of the board to just get into and give us some information about how this is manifesting in the classroom or in schools.

So Director Hersey, I'm going to leave it to you to facilitate some Q&A.

All right.

Everybody knows the protocol.

If you have a question, please turn up your name tag and I will recognize you.

Director Rankin.

Thank you.

I'm wondering about the 80%, if there's any patterns emerging over where it's being implemented and where it's not, and if you've identified any barriers or if it's just that it takes time for things to roll out.

Go ahead.

Great question, because there's a lot we can get just from completion data.

One in particular is that some of our schools were struggling with pacing, and so they were meant to do these curriculum-bedded assessments in a particular window to show that whether students were reaching standards and getting the opportunity to meet those standards.

So some of the not getting to 100% is about the fact that students need more time, which begs the question of how do we help those educators cover all the key standards.

The second piece is that there are some smaller cases of which students, we're finding out students aren't getting full access to standards-based instruction, which I know is very important to this board as well as the community.

And that's also a thing that we've been able to address by having this data.

And another thing to add to that, along with trying to understand why we might not be getting 100%, student absenteeism contributes to some of that.

But if we're looking at specifically the adult behaviors, one of the things that we're doing right now at the secondary level is a brand new curriculum.

Brand new curriculum takes time to be able to implement figure out your timing as a teacher as a professional educator learning the curriculum yourself and the timing at the same time is some of the things that we heard back from our high school principals about some of the things that they were seeing at the building level.

Any additional questions Director Rankin do you have more please continue.

Thank you.

We may not know this because this is the first year, but regarding the pacing, I am wondering how we reconcile having, I mean curriculum assessment sounds very kind of ominous, but it's a unit test.

I remember, you know, you get to the end of a unit, you take the, I remember doing that in school.

I guess my concern is that The changes in adult behavior we don't want are to go towards compliance instead of learning.

We don't want for classrooms to feel like they have to adhere to this same schedule when their students are going to have very, very different needs.

And there's going to be maybe one classroom where a unit is mastered and everybody's ready to move on, and one classroom where maybe they realize, wow, something was off here and my class just isn't ready to to go on to the next thing yet um can you describe a little bit about how that works and that's really a difference between curriculum and instruction and how yeah

So I'm going to ask Dr. Starosky and Perkins to kind of finish this, but we started an assessment calendar that we wanted to see how all these align with our formative assessments and our summative assessments.

And we're starting to see where there's overlaps, where there's gaps, but I think the piece around kind of the behavioral supports that we're providing, I'll let Dr. Starosky and Perkins talk about that.

the first thing that comes to mind about what you're speaking to is that we're not expecting our educators on Tuesday, everyone to be in the same lockstep.

And also recognizing that there are, even within school buildings and grade levels, people are gonna be at different places for different reasons.

And that's why we're providing a window.

And so it's a three week window that we're asking our educators to try to, to get into somewhere, somehow, and from that, that's gonna help us inform next year's first assessments.

Maybe the window needs to be smaller, maybe it needs to be moved up earlier, but listening to our educators about what's really working in the day-to-day, and maybe it's the window's fine, it's just the first time everyone as an entire system is trying to work this together.

So the window is our primary, way to mitigate that concern.

I'll just chime in briefly that a theme tonight has been the importance of differentiated instruction.

So this is absolutely not about lockstep.

But one first step to be able to differentiate instruction is to understand where your students are, which of them are meeting standards, which of them are not.

just to make it a little bit more tangible just to highlight part of the memo from our math first round of math cea we learned that the students in math 7 were having trouble community computing unit rates involving fractions and you're probably well what's that mean that example i ran one third of a mile in one half hour what is my rate in miles per hour so we we highlighted in certain classrooms that students weren't getting that in other classrooms they were and they were able to to move faster or move beyond So it is a key to differentiation is a key to find a way to challenge all students is to have this data.

But no it does not mean lockstep.

Thank you.

Do we have any other questions at this time.

OK seeing none I'll hand it over back to you president top.

We're going to shuffle back up again to the dais and go into the business action items on today's agenda.

We have now reached the consent portion of today's agenda.

May I have a motion for the consent agenda?

Yes, I move for the approval of the consent agenda.

Second.

APPROVAL OF THE CONSENT AGENDA HAS BEEN MOVED BY DIRECTOR HERSEY AND SECONDED BY DIRECTOR MIZERAHI.

DO DIRECTORS HAVE ANY ITEMS THEY WOULD LIKE TO REMOVE FROM THE CONSENT AGENDA?

ALL RIGHT.

SEEING NONE, ALL THOSE IN FAVOR OF THE CONSENT AGENDA SIGNIFY BY SAYING AYE.

AYE.

AYE.

AYE.

AYE.

AYE.

Those opposed?

The consent agenda has passed unanimously.

All right, we will now move to our action item, renewal of the superintendent's employment agreement.

May I have a motion for this item?

I move that the school board authorized the board president to execute an amendment to the superintendent's employment agreement excuse me extending the term specified in section one to June 30th 2027 a one year extension of the current term consistent with the provision of section one stating that the board shall annually vote whether to renew the agreement for a term of up to three years at the start of each year.

Immediate action is in the best interest of the district.

Second.

This item has been moved by Vice President Briggs and seconded by Director Mizrahi.

I will tee up this item briefly and then move to board discussion.

The superintendent's employment agreement approved October 1st provides that the board shall vote whether to renew the superintendent agreement for a term of up to three years no later than January 15th of each contract year.

By mutual agreement, this was deferred to today's meeting.

Today's motion extends the term by one year consistent with this language and our obligation to vote on renewal.

If approved, I will sign an amendment to the employment agreement that extends the term but does not include any other additions.

I will now open it up for board discussion.

I was trying to bring up something to look at on my screen that's not coming up.

Sorry.

Director Rankin, do you want to speak?

Sure, I have gotten some questions about this and some puzzlement about the fact that the contract was just approved in October, and now here we are.

So the contract that we approved, it took us a while to get to a final agreement.

And as the board president at the time, I was the designee on behalf of the board to do that.

The contract used to have this automatic annual rollover that the board had to notify the superintendent publicly in September if they intended to nonrevenue in November for a contract that ended in June.

And in my time as a community member and as a board director, that was always very like CONFUSING AND IT PUT THE BOARD IN A WEIRD PLACE WHERE YOU HAVE TO MAKE A DECISION ABOUT THE CONTRACT OF YOUR SINGULAR EMPLOYEE NINE MONTHS AHEAD OF WHEN IT EXPIRED OR ELSE IT WOULD JUST RENEW IN PERPETUITY.

SO THAT'S WHY THERE'S THIS NOW IS IN RESPONSE TO THAT, THAT THE BOARD WOULD AFFIRMATIVELY VOTE TO EXTEND RATHER THAN HAVE TO NOTIFY NONEXTENTION.

If that makes sense.

But given for me personally, given as the current contract was just approved in October for a time through June of 2026, I AM NOT COMFORTABLE CONSIDERING AN EXTENSION AT THIS POINT.

I WOULD PREFER THAT WE COULD CONSIDER IT AGAIN IN JUNE OR EVEN A YEAR FROM NOW AND I WILL BE VOTING NO.

THANK YOU, DIRECTOR RANKIN.

OTHERS?

DIRECTOR MIZERAHI.

I think I was one of those voices that had initial questions about why this was coming up now.

I think my first question was, wait, didn't we just do this?

Just the timing seems odd.

But given this, I've thought a lot about this extension and the timing of it because this is the time when we have a vote on it.

The question that I've been asking myself is what gives us the greatest chance of meeting the goals that we just passed at the last meeting and to me giving Dr. Jones and his team the runway to actually execute those goals and put a plan into place and see it through I think is the is the right move and I think that that will give us the greatest opportunity to meet those goals and I think any turnover or even folks looking a year ahead and seeing potential turnover I think would be very harmful for us meeting those goals.

THANK YOU, DIRECTOR MISERAHI.

OTHERS?

I WILL JUST QUICKLY ECHO WHAT DIRECTOR MISERAHI SAID.

I THINK WE'VE SET SOME AMBITIOUS GOALS.

WE HAVE A LOT OF REALLY DIFFICULT THINGS AHEAD OF US, A BUDGET DEFICIT, TRYING TO FIGURE OUT HOW BEST TO USE OUR RESOURCES, A STRATEGIC PLAN THAT NEEDS TO ALIGN WITH OUR NEWLY ADOPTED GOALS AND GUARD RAILS.

And I think taking a term from Director Mizrahi, providing the runway in order to get those done and to show that you have progress and having two years to do that, I think will be very impactful for our students.

And now is not the time for disruption or chaos, especially when I'm feeling a lot of disruption and chaos from the federal government.

So I look forward to supporting the extension this evening.

Other directors.

All right, then we will have Ms. Wilson-Jones please call the roll.

Director Hersey?

Aye.

Director Mizrahi?

Aye.

Director Rankin?

No.

Director Sarju?

Abstain.

Vice President Briggs?

No.

Director Clark?

President top I this motion has passed with a vote of 4 yes to 2 no and 1 abstention.

Thank you.

Appreciate that.

We are going to now move to the introduction item approval of the Seattle School Board sponsorship for proposed Washington State School Board Directors Association positions.

Tongue twister.

As legislative liaison, Director Rankin has teed up this board action report for us to consider whether there are any positions we wish to propose to the Washington State School DIRECTOR'S ASSOCIATION.

IF THERE ARE POSITIONS WE WISH TO PROPOSE BASED ON TONIGHT'S DISCUSSION, THEN THE BOARD ACTION REPORT WILL BE UPDATED PRIOR TO ACTION IN MARCH TO INCLUDE RELEVANT POSITIONS.

AND I'M GOING TO HAND IT OVER TO DIRECTOR RANKIN NOW TO INTRODUCE THIS ITEM AS THE SPONSOR.

DIRECTOR RANKIN.

THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

SO IF YOU'LL REMEMBER, BACK IN So it's a little bit of a funky timeline.

But if you think about it in terms of the calendar year, we're at the beginning, even though the fall feels like the beginning for us on the school calendar.

So Director Topp and I attended the WASDA, or Washington State School Director Association General Assembly, where I, as our legislative liaison, am our designated board's voting delegate.

Every board sends a voting delegate.

Other people can attend, but only one board member votes on behalf of each board.

And we look together at positions that have been submitted by members of the 295 school districts across the state and vote as a body what we as a statewide organization want to support.

That then becomes the advocacy platform.

So you can see from our vote in September on adopting different positions and some that already existed.

Right now, when I go to Olympia, I'm able to, if it's a WASDA position, say, on behalf of the membership of WASDA or as a WASDA member, the same way I'm able to say this is a position of Seattle Public Schools.

And so it's really powerful to have that statewide voice and to have it voted on membership representing all of our 1.1 million children in Washington State and their communities together and having the voice of the body behind it.

So every year, districts have the opportunity to submit the positions for consideration that then go to be voted on by membership in September.

And so the window where they accept submissions is between our March and April board meetings.

So in order on our schedule of introduction and action, we're introducing it tonight and I wanna make sure that you all know that this is our opportunity for individual directors to propose positions if you have any that you want us to take.

So that we can vote on them as a board in March because you can't, the submissions have to be on behalf of the whole board.

Individual directors can't submit their own position.

So we have to take a board vote before it goes into the window.

So that's why the introduction now doesn't have anything in it.

in terms of actual positions.

If nobody has positions, we just would not take action on this item.

I have at least one that I'm working on and has to do with board governance training and the legislature.

So if there are any questions anyone has now, we can talk about them now.

Or if you want, go and look at the current position catalog.

and see if there's anything you believe that the state association should have a position on.

And I can support developing the position if you want.

There's also WASDA staff can offer some support.

And then when we come back in March, any positions that we have written will be adopted or voted on.

And if adopted, then I'll submit them on our behalf to WASDA and they will become part of the catalog of positions that are considered by the voting delegates again this September that would set the priorities for 2026. Does that make sense?

All right, any questions or discussion?

All right.

Yeah, and just let me know if you come up with something that you want to address.

And student members, too.

Take a look.

Let me know.

We can bring something together to the board to consider and pass along to WESDA.

Thank you, Director Rankin.

I got to accompany Director Rankin to the General Assembly meeting and it was one of the best run meetings I've been to in a very long time and appreciate all the work you're doing there tracking all the positions.

We are going to now move back to the tables, I promise for a final time tonight, and we'll work on the back and forth on the future agendas, for a final time tonight to do enrollment study and highly capable services update.

So take your microphones, we'll meet back there.

We're gonna stay there for the rest of the evening.

All right, directors, we are joined by Strategies 360 for a presentation finding from the recent enrollment study.

Staff, can you confirm that Strategies 360 is online?

Yep, it looks like they are.

And so I'm going to pass it over to our guests from Strategies 360 for introductions and to begin the presentation.

Good evening.

This is David Cornarin, Senior Vice President of Research with Strategies 360. Let me know if I'm being heard and if we are approved to proceed.

We can hear you and you may proceed.

Wonderful.

I'm being joined here tonight by Rachel Nakanishi, who is our vice president of communications, working with our education team.

and is a former Seattle Public Schools staffer herself.

We are presenting data in a limited amount of time, but data on our representative study of adults with school-aged children in the Seattle Public School District, meaning Seattle, Washington.

And so we will proceed.

Next slide, please.

So I'm actually going to take a moment on the slide to explain what we did with this study and why we didn't.

Starting from what this study was able to produce, we very deliberately wanted to understand the thoughts, opinions, and perceptions of families across Seattle, Washington.

And specifically, we wanted to understand how to retain families of current students in addition to which ways we could attract back into enrolling into Seattle Public Schools families of former students.

That ability to understand where there is commonality of opinion, or agreement and where there is divergence or difference of opinion between those two groups in the smaller squares here led us to interview over a thousand adults of school-age children.

The reason why it is such a large number of interviews, specifically 1,420, is because they are representative.

Meaning that we tracked many metrics amongst the largest group, that largest shape there on the bottom half, and then within the smaller shapes.

And those metrics and characteristics were tracked and weighed upon so that 1,420 interviews would be representative of all adults of school age children within Seattle, Washington.

And the same goes for adults of currently enrolled children and adults of formerly enrolled children.

That process and the size of these smaller shapes are the way they are because 71%, we calculated with the assistance of SPS enrollment staff and MIT graduate researchers, 71% of adults with school-aged children in Seattle, Washington, had their children enrolled in Seattle Public Schools.

So we are able to report data that is representative of these different shapes and know that is representative, even though we may have only talked to 300 interviews in one shape or 1,015 interviews in another shape, we know that they're representative of the opinions with a margin of error, taken of all of those individuals despite not talking to all of them.

The third shape is adults of children who have never been enrolled in Seattle Public Schools and that is a necessary byproduct of interviewing all of these groups but that group is so small then that information is more directional or descriptive than it is representative of that group.

So I know there's been some questions, very warranted, and I hope this explanation of the methodology that we conducted, ensuring that these groups of adults or caretakers of students are in the correct proportion to each other so that they're representative of all adults of school-age children in Seattle and representative within the individual groups.

answers all questions.

I will briefly just say that this survey was collecting interviews between, I believe, October 28th, 2024 and December 4th, 2024. It was offered through live interviewers calling cell phones, landlines, SMS text invitations to take the survey and web hosted and a few other methods, too.

We additionally offer this survey to be taken in English, Spanish, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Somali and Amharic languages, which was then translated after the fact.

So we took very deliberative steps to meet caretakers of students where they prefer and how they prefer to take interviews and discuss these topics.

Next slide, please.

so first um just a brief uh if we go to the next slide um just a brief um question that we asked as a baseline attitude we asked for the level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction towards Seattle Public Schools amongst these groups.

The labels should be read as due to sizing.

There's fewer words than we would like, but they should be read as among caretakers of current students, among caretakers of former students, and among caretakers of students who have never enrolled in Seattle Public Schools.

The large numbers at the top of each bar represent the total or overall satisfaction or dissatisfaction The numbers within the bars represent the nuance of either very satisfied versus somewhat satisfied.

Very dissatisfied would be the darker section, somewhat dissatisfied.

And we can report that, again, keeping in mind this is representative data, among caretakers of current students, there is 86% overall satisfaction towards Seattle Public Schools and 13% dissatisfaction overall among caretakers of former students there is 32 percent overall satisfaction towards Seattle Public Schools which their children no longer attend in 66 percent overall dissatisfaction and then unsurprisingly among caretakers have never students who have never enrolled in Seattle Public schools the not sure rate is notably higher 25 not sure when asked about their neighborhood schools uh 22 overall satisfaction 53 overall dissatisfaction keeping in mind that the number of interviews in each of these groups is proportional so as to be representative of how much Each group makes up of all adults of school aged children as of the year 2024 in Seattle, Washington.

The views of caretakers of current students that 86 compared overall satisfaction to 13% satisfaction.

represents roughly 71 or 72% of adults of school-age children in Seattle, Washington, whereas the caretakers of former students represents a smaller portion, roughly 21%.

And the caretakers of students who've never enrolled on the furthest right hand side represents the views of 7% of adults of school aged children.

Again, those percentages are purposeful so that they accurately represent how much each group of caretakers makes up of the overall population of adults of school aged children.

Next slide, please.

now that we have an idea of what these labels mean i'm going to describe two types of questions that we asked we very specifically either ask questions that had a limited number of answer options such as the previous slide those we would call quantitative questions those are questions you normally would find in a survey what is unique is in this survey we also were able to ask up to 30 qualitative or open-ended questions which in effect is almost like public comment for a open-ended qualitative question which is the data we're seeing here a survey responding can say as much or as little as detailed or as vague as positive or as negative as they prefer literally anything they either type in is they're answering the question if they're taking it online or or they say if they're talking to a live interviewer is recorded.

We then review all that data, clean it, make sure there's no typos.

We use a advanced sentiment analysis tool using machine learning, artificial intelligence, which creates these categories that you see in front of you here.

we review those categories and labels after the fact.

So on the front and the back end of using that artificial intelligence tool, we are doing human review.

With that being said, from here on out, I will be notating whether this data represents qualitative questions as we see here or respondents can say whatever they want and it's categorized or whether it is representing quantitative questions that have a limited number of answer options what this provides is when we make conclusions we're making them based on multiple types of questions from each of the qualitative and quantitative varieties I just mentioned we therefore much more confident in our conclusions the first of which is that when asked what caretakers like especially about Seattle Public Schools and again comparing caretakers of current students to caretakers of former students A through line was found that was the most widely shared positive perception was Seattle Public Schools as a place in close proximity to one's own home where there was positive socioeconomic.

emotional engagement with friends with teachers and high high quality teachers especially and that it was a positive student experience that's all to say quote unquote a sense of belonging that was the most widely shared positive perception towards seattle public schools among both caretakers of current students and caretakers of former students now if we go to the next slide we see that exact same conclusion borne out by asking uh caretakers of current students to rate each of these factors and the question was for each of the following factors i read please indicate how much of a motivation that reason provides for your student to continue attending Seattle Public Schools.

Again, this is why it's important that we interviewed both caretakers of current students and caretakers of former students so we could compare the two groups.

And what rises to the top as the highest percentage saying that's a highly motivating reason to keep my child enrolled is sense of community and belonging, close distance or proximity, friends, high-quality teaching and support.

So we now see this borne out in a quantitative question as the slide before this was a completely open-ended qualitative question.

If we go to the next slide, we will then see in a slightly different quantitative format, we now are not asking the survey respondents to rate each individual reason, But to instead pick the top to pick their two most motivating reason as a caretaker of a current student to keep your student enrolled in Seattle Public Schools.

And it is that sense of community and belonging and highly high quality teaching and support for students that rises to the top.

Notably, close travel distance and curriculum being taught is and I would call it a secondary tier.

But we now have an idea because these reasons have been tested in a qualitative format and a quantitative format where we were asking respondents to rate individually each reason and then a quantitative format where we said, OK, you can only pick the top two reason.

Reasons that high quality teaching, supported students, and a sense of community and belonging are the most widely shared positive perceptions that caretakers have towards Seattle Public Schools.

That we can be sure of.

Next slide, please.

So now on the other side of the coin, what is the reasoning or decision making behind caretakers who have chosen to disenroll their students from Seattle Public Schools?

It's a bit broader than caretakers of former students, but that is who we will largely focus on.

If we could go to the next slide.

I will just pause to say that our colleagues at the enrollment team have conducted a very thorough what I would call big data analysis of what has been contributing.

And I will describe this in terms of what the slides are that we have provided and are going through compared to what this type of big data analysis provides.

What we are doing is conducting over a thousand interviews that are representative of both adults of school-age children, but those discrete groups I mentioned, especially caretakers of current and caretakers of former students.

This study that we, Strategies 360, have conducted is the why, the decision-making, the reasons, the perceptions, the public opinion.

What our colleagues at the enrollment team have conducted is a very, very thorough analysis of the data, the what.

What happened?

Where did it happen?

At what time did it happen?

And so that is how these two studies and all of our work complements each other.

I will briefly pause if there is any interest in the room to have our colleagues describe this or just let me know if I should proceed.

Board Directors.

We have questions, but I think the question is, do we want that described in further detail, or do we want to proceed and continue on?

Let's continue on, and then wait.

I think we do have, directors do have questions, and I think there's a lot of interest for questions, so we'll save time at the end for questions.

Yes, please.

If we could move to the next slide again.

So we are looking at the other side of the coin, the most widely shared either negative perceptions or critical constructive feedback.

When we asked in a qualitative open-ended fashion what uh caretakers disliked about seattle public schools um there was a widely shared concern over the quality of education um funding class sizes uh overcrowding and you can see those reasons rise to the top amongst both caretakers of current students and caretakers of former students.

On the right hand side, we have a pop out bubble.

Again, keeping in mind this is all qualitative data that is categorized and then those categories are reviewed by us.

um what that 48 bar breaks down into as you can see here this is kind of the pros and cons effectively of qualitative data you can receive any amount of information detail or idea that a survey respondent may have but sometimes it makes it a little messy in terms of categorizing it so if you do have interest in what these overall categories mean this is an example we've provided for an especially large one poor education curriculum and teaching And we can see how there is, when you really start drilling down some more mixed opinions that are more difficult to articulate and a little bit more mixed.

But the big, and we'll drill into this in further slides, the big concern is quality of education when it comes to negatives or gaps that caretakers would like to see closed.

Let's go to the next slide.

where we ask in a quantitative fashion among caretakers of current students, how would you rate these reasons in terms of strongly considering them as a reason to disenroll all the way over to never considering them as a reason to disenroll.

And again, we see concerns about the quality of education rising to the top.

58% of caretakers of current students have either strongly or moderately considered disenrolling their students due to concerns over quality of education compared to other factors which are at lower levels of consideration.

And again, like I said, this is why we conducted the survey we did so we could both accurately understand the perceptions of caretakers of current families and how best to retain them and then also caretakers of former students and any possibility of attracting those students back into the system and their families and caretakers.

Next slide, please.

So

This is the same data or excuse me, same question, but asked of caretakers of former students.

So we on the last slide looked at caretakers of current students.

Now this is caretakers of students whose families have made the active and taking the step to disenroll.

Again, quality of education rises to the top.

We ask it a slightly different way since the action has already been made to disenroll, but all of these factors are asked on a scale of did that factor motivate you a great deal, motivate you somewhat, or not motivate you at all.

in the decision you've taken to disenroll your students.

On the right hand side, we have this broken down by the actual self-reported year of disenrollment.

So we can look at the factors and the self-reported levels of motivation for these factors broken down before covid health care crisis during the covid health care crisis and after the covid health care crisis with the middle column in red noting the exact dates for that the reason we did this is because it is important to point out the top three high most highly reported reasons that families made the decision to disenroll are always the same.

Quality of education, a sense that a better option was available, and concerns over the curriculum being taught.

That is true whether it is before, during, or after the COVID health care crisis.

The only thing that comes close is, as you can see, highlighted in purple notations and boxes, is there is concerns over changes to highly capable before COVID, pre-COVID that rises up still only to a fourth highest factor, but higher than other points in time.

And then if we were to combine COVID or school closures due to COVID and online only classes due to COVID, that would be basically tied for second.

But quality of education is always number one, regardless of what time the act of disenrolling their student was.

Took place, excuse me.

If we go to the next slide.

We asked again in a slightly different way among caretakers of former students rather than the previous slide which was rate each individual reason we now are saying choose the top two reasons and the top two reasons only two selections can be made of why caretakers of former students made the decision to disenroll was concerns over quality of education and the curriculum being taught Further down is perception that a better option was available at 28 percent in changes to highly capable services at nine, sense of lack of safety at nine too.

So we now can have some confidence in the conclusion whether we are talking about caretakers of current students, caretakers of former students whether we're asking the question allowing them to say whatever they want to in response or asking the question in a quantitative form with predefined answer options that is more narrow the same reasons rise to the top and are most widely shared.

If you go to the next slide, relatedly but slightly different, we asked caretakers of current students, we asked caretakers of current students, what do you believe is the most important priority for Seattle Public Schools in the near future?

This is qualitative, so they could say whatever they wanted, and we would categorize it after the fact.

Improving educational quality is number one within that 43%.

That breaks down to 23%, mentioning needing a higher quality of education, focusing on quality teaching should be a priority, challenging education, 6%, bring back highly capable, 4%, there's a reason I have quotations around bring back.

and so on and so forth.

We see how that breaks down, increasing funding at 28%, and we have some more options further down there.

So this is all to say on this slide that there are concerns over the quality of education, but it is broader, more broadly shared, and perceived than any one specific service program.

And that is something that we recommend Seattle Public Schools focuses on based on this data is a more broadly shared concern over improving educational quality.

if we go to the next slide this is a slide that was formulated in conjunction with the enrollment staff basically next steps are areas for exploration I can briefly just say I know they can speak to it better than I can but Their identified areas for exploration is engagement with early learners, especially focusing on making sure the rate of children born in Seattle corresponds as closely as possible to the rate of attendance in pre-K.

Engagement with the community around curriculum and instruction related to what I just mentioned about concerns about the quality and challenging academics needing to be challenging.

finding unaccounted for students, creating a task force specifically to engage students of color and understand why they're leaving Seattle public schools at higher rates than white students.

And then continuing to partner with city agencies to support planning for affordable housing for Seattle families.

Again, the enrollment staff can speak to this with more detail and specificity.

And I believe that is our last slide.

Great.

We have questions.

And Director Mizrahi is extra prepared.

His card is already up.

Yeah, thank you, David.

I appreciate the thorough presentation.

I have a few questions.

One, is there statistically significant enough data to get disaggregated data based on racial demographics, geography, socioeconomics?

And I would love to see that and also just ask you if you, off the top of your head, know, were there any things that stood out as areas where there were vastly different responses or anything that stood out?

in those subgroups, yeah.

Yes, provided more time I could go into those slides, but I can tell you there actually were very few examples of subgroups that had divergent opinions.

Part of the benefit of interviewing upwards of 1,420 is that the margin of error level is relatively low for a poll even within subgroups.

And we did make sure to control for and make sure that these results were represented geographically, racially and ethnically by gender and by student enrollment status, like I said.

But like one of the few examples I can say is caretakers of former students of Seattle Public Schools reported that they would never enroll their students at a higher rate if they made over $250,000 a year.

So that is one of the very few examples of a divergent opinion.

When we looked at the subgroups, when I was describing reason why families disenrolled their students, regardless of whether it was before, during or after COVID, in terms of their self-reported disenrollment date, quality of education was number one among all of those groups, regardless of when they disenrolled.

And for many questions, we see the exact same thing, whether we break it down by geography, race, gender, so on and so forth.

But in the future, I'd be happy to go into more detail.

And with current students, I'd also be curious if there was any difference between elementary age, middle school, and high school.

I would have to look back at the data.

I know that the actual report among caretakers of former students, the actual reported disenrollment grade level, the time when the decision was made to disenroll, spiked at certain points when there was, I believe, a transfer change from elementary school to middle school, middle school to high school.

But I'd have to go back and look at that data broken down by specific grade levels.

Perfect.

Thank you.

Other directors?

Director Briggs.

Thanks, David, for the presentation.

I just, you know, it strikes me that, sorry, I'm looking for the slide.

The first slide with the bars.

that says caretakers of current students have a positive view or overwhelming satisfaction of Seattle Public Schools.

Just that there's a pretty, it feels to me like a pretty big difference between somewhat satisfied and very satisfied.

Like somewhat satisfied could mean, you know, like whoever was being interviewed had a really great teacher at one point, and for that reason they, you know, felt that they could say that they were somewhat satisfied.

What, do you have any other information that you can provide about what somewhat satisfied, like that just feels like a spectrum, I guess, and so I'm wondering if you have any insight there.

Yes.

I can say that it is a spectrum very purposely.

We ask these questions to be able to report overall data, that 86% to 13% being overall satisfaction versus overall dissatisfaction.

But we also then ask the specific answer options to provide that nuance and I would agree with you that 51% being somewhat satisfied is probably the biggest takeaway of that as it is the largest group and a majority by itself so I would say with more time I could go into some of the With more time, I could go into the qualitative questions broken down by that only within that somewhat satisfied group.

But simply tonight, I was only able to go over the high level.

But yes, I think it's right that you're focusing on that nuance.

Director Mizrahi.

Nope.

Go for it.

OK.

So on slide, I don't have the number here.

OK.

So you have the slide that shows that the shrinking kindergarten classes is one of the drivers of enrollment decline.

So I'm curious.

So given that that would indicate to me that the group, the never enrolled group, is fairly important.

And I'm wondering if there is a version of the slide 10, 12, and 13 that was specific to folks who unenrolled.

Was there a version of that question for people who never enrolled?

What was their perception that led them to not enroll?

Yeah I can speak broadly about the caretakers of students who have never enrolled with those groups we did ask both quantitative and qualitative questions and having looked over I believe it's almost 8,000 qualitative responses I can tell you there are higher rates of families making the decision based on parochial or religious reasons, higher rates of families making the decision based on political reasons, and then higher rates of families making the decision to never enroll based on concerns over challenging academics.

So it is slightly higher.

amongst all of those factors are more highly reported amongst caretakers of students who've never enrolled in the system.

But I think my colleagues on the enrollment team can speak to the shrinking kindergarten classes as actually likely being motivated or connected to different factors.

I just was answering that question based on the qualitative data, especially from the caretakers of students never enrolled.

Right, okay, appreciate it.

Does staff want to respond at all?

Hello?

So we added that slide, it's just to have.

Since we didn't introduce you at the top, just introduce yourself.

Hi, my name is and I'm the director of enrollment.

So we added that slide in this presentation just to give you some context that as we see the out-migration with our students who have left, we also have continuing shrinking kindergarten classes because of our birth rates and our birth decay ratio that those births don't show up and enroll in kindergarten.

In fact, at the peak, we had 72% of those cohorts coming in, giving us 4,500 to 5,000 kindergartens in those cohorts.

Now we're at 53% of the birth rate decay.

So we're looking at 3,600 cohorts of kindergarten.

So that is our biggest decline that you see year over year because of the birth decay ratios continuing to decline.

Because they're opting for other options or because they're moving out of the city?

Like, what's the reason?

Yes, all of the above.

All of the above, okay.

Yeah, there's multiple choices that they have, including public school, so.

I guess I would add, and I'm Fred Podesta, Chief Operations Officer.

As David noted, for the prospective families who are going to enroll, their concerns mirrored the same in the currently enrolled and formally enrolled group about academic rigor and But they had some externalities that don't apply to the other group, that they weren't considering public school because they were interested in a parochial school.

There was also a fairly broad segment that just said they didn't, and that we don't have details about, that they never considered public school for whatever reason.

But of those that did and chose something comparable, I think the dimensions of it were similar to the other two populations.

So I have a question, and I'm struggling to differentiate, I'm looking at slide 13, sort of this idea of concerns over the quality of education and the idea of curriculum being taught.

How do we differentiate those things, and are they the same thing?

Or, yeah, just kind of some understanding there would be helpful.

And I'm actually looking at the presentation of all of the slides tonight.

What is the header in red of the slide that you're focusing on?

Caretakers who disenrolled their students from SPS overwhelmingly cited concerns about the quality of education and the curriculum as top reasons.

Okay, so I'm on the correct slide then.

So for these...

For the top reasons, you're asking for more detail on what they meant?

I guess.

It seems like those two are very connected.

they they are and i will say that um if you look at some of the other slides where there is um basically pop out bubbles or pop out shapes describing how the bars break down this being a qualitative or excuse me um this is actually a quantitative question uh so so the way this question was asked We aren't necessarily able to get that nuance.

A different slide which has one of the pop-out bubbles would be able to give more nuance and break down what it means within the bars.

The advantage of a slide like this where it says top motivating reasons to leave SPS is we force the survey respondents to really congregate and choose only two options out of a preselected list of options.

So intentionally there's not the ability to really impart a lot of nuance or detail.

I think one of the other slides would have more of what you're looking for, such as the why do people dislike Seattle Public Schools?

Back a couple of slides.

Among the former students, you can see that pop-out bubble describing the bar of 48% studying poor education curriculum in teachers.

And I think that will give more of the detail that you're looking for because the question here This slide begins both caretakers of current students and former students.

This question was asked in a way where respondents could say literally as much or as little as positive or as negative as detailed or as vague.

And we capture that sentiment rather than giving a predetermined selection of let's say 12 answer options and only allowing them to choose two.

Any other questions from board directors?

Does staff have anything to add or anything to add specifically on the areas for exploration on the end slide?

So I think we definitely want to focus on early learners and the kindergarten enrollment rate.

The pattern of families disenrolling students during the course of their career has stayed Very stable in the same study period.

So the mechanics of lower enrollment are, we're attracting fewer students, not that we're losing, that students are disenrolling during their career.

And then obviously the kindergarten cohort represents a bow wave through the whole system.

Since we have a focus on early learning, since we have relationships with early learning, we do want to know more about that group of families that don't ever enroll, and that we think that's kind of the connection point to see in elementary grades in particular, kindergarten in particular, that that would be, this is a great kind of landscape analysis to say, so you can't make everything a priority.

That's the next step is, so what do we do with this data?

these data and where do we do it?

You know, what do we focus on?

All right.

Well, thank you so much to Strategies 360 for being here this evening.

I think we will move into our final update for this evening.

Staff will provide the status update on highly capable services, something we heard strong concern about in public testimony in light of our changes to board policy number 2190 this fall.

Give staff a moment to transition here.

Then I will turn it over to you, Dr. Jones.

Yes, thank you.

In the board's revisions to 2190 this fall, you directed me to bring the information that will be used to develop the highly capable plan before we bring the final plan for your approval.

In this update, we'll be providing a couple of things.

One is the information about how we're implementing 2190 and transitioning how we serve students who qualify for highly capable services.

Second, it will be an opportunity for me to hear from you what details will be most helpful to bring you in alignment with the new requirement in 2190. I will then come back to the board with information and detail required in 2190 prior to bringing the highly capable plan for approval.

With that, I'll pass it on to Associate Superintendent Torres Morales, who will bring the expertise and perspective to what we're trying to get done here.

Thank you.

Thank you, Superintendent Jones and School Board.

I'm gonna give us a high-level progress update on the Highly Capable Plan.

So next slide, please.

All right, so what we're gonna do is an overview.

We're gonna start off with a timeline review of the policy 2021, or 2190, from the timeline review of when it first passed in 2021 through 2028, and then touch on the update that was done in the fall of 2024. Then I'm gonna talk through a bit of the model descriptions.

Essentially, what did the servicing models look like prior to 2021?

What do they look like currently?

And then what is the intended future state based on policy 2190?

We're gonna also get into a conversation around the number of students served.

Part of the passage of 2190 back in 2021 involved universal screening, so we're going to provide some data around what those trends look like.

And then we're gonna talk a little bit about the financing, and then some next steps that are currently in process for the department and the district.

So next slide, please.

This timeline here just shows a timeline from when the initial policy passage was done to start thinking about doing a neighborhood model versus the cohort model.

And essentially what this does is it provides a bit of a roadmap of steps of things that were to take place each part of the year as we get into the rollout of the model and move into a neighborhood school model per policy.

Next slide, please.

So policy 2190 in the fall of 2024, there was an update to the policy and essentially it was adding pieces around what Dr. Jones was just referencing around bringing a more robust plan forward before the board prior to submitting to OSPI finally for the year.

It's almost more like a template that OSPI requires us to fill out and submit, and they consider that to be the plan, and that's how we get our funding from the state.

And we have to get that done every year through an approval of the board.

What this policy is saying is yes, and can you please bring us some more detail around those things versus just the plan that OSPI has put forward.

And so this is our first step in sharing some information with you all, and then looking forward to coming back with further information as we progress.

So next slide, please.

So this slide discusses the model description.

So the first box here on the left, it says model prior to policy 2190 that was passed in 2021. So essentially, if there was a child who was found to qualify for highly capable services, it was the parent's choice to enroll and or access the highly capable services at the cohort school.

So students were essentially sent to cohort schools where curriculum was delivered to grade levels above for all students if the option was chosen.

The screening was not necessarily universal.

There was staff recommendations that were put into this.

There was outside testing that people were able to access for these sort of things, et cetera.

Essentially, at the local school, there wasn't always servicing available.

There were some schools that were doing some accelerated things, but it was not universally done, and it was only in certain parts of the city.

The current model, meaning where we're at now based on that timeline, involves still having a cohort model where if a child is qualified for highly capable services, the parents choose.

Do I want my kid to go to their neighborhood school, or do I want them to go to the cohort model?

The cohort model still exists as is with instruction at two years ahead.

It is the same curriculum that we would use in the neighborhood school, but at the two years ahead.

In the neighborhood school, what you would see is differentiation and universal design for learning in depth and complexity.

Each school needs to have a CSIP to explain how they will deliver those services for those students, and they are held accountable to that CSIP.

Additionally, in the current model, one of the big differences was the universal screening.

So now at this point, every student gets screened regardless, and then based on that, that's how you qualify for services.

So it wasn't necessarily in the previous model where it was based on a referral or an assessment that was done from outside psychs and those sort of things.

So it's a universal screening process.

So based on the way 2190, which is the policy is currently written, the future would be that all kids would attend their neighborhood school for their HC services.

Universal screening continues, and each school will continue to refine their CSIP and determine how they're gonna provide these services to kids in schools.

Next slide, please.

So if we look here, this basically is giving us the number of students served.

It's just some data to look at.

If you look at the bar chart on the right, what you're gonna see is right around the 2019 point, you'll see an increase in the number of students that are now qualified for highly capable services.

That is because, I should say in 2021, that is because of the universal screening.

And particularly what you'll notice is the number of students of color that are now being identified as highly capable students has increased as well.

If you go to the next slide, there's a little bit more data in a chart form.

There we go.

So if you look 2021 forward, that's where you'll see some of the big differences.

So if we just highlight a couple data points.

If you look, for example, black African-American students, back in 2019, there were about 70 students that were qualified for highly capable services.

2021 was the policy change and the switch to universal screening.

We've been doing that for a few years now.

Fast forward, I believe the number says we're at 195 now.

So it shows that we have 125 more black and African-American students who are being qualified as students who are highly capable at this point.

And if you look across some of our other student of color categories, such as Hispanic and multiracial, you'll see similar trends and for our Asian students as well.

So essentially, one of the big pushes when the policy change came up was around, are we actually identifying all of our students that are really highly capable, or is it that it's getting a select group of students in?

So that was a big push for the district, and what we're seeing is that through this process of the universal screening, we are identifying more students of color as actually being students who are highly capable as well.

Another data point to just talk through quickly is that approximately at this point, you know in the previous slide we were talking about there's the three different models like what it was, where we're at now, where we're going.

And so at this point parents do get to choose to remain in the neighborhood school or attend the cohort school.

And what our data is showing us is about 38% of AT qualified students are choosing to remain in their neighborhood school versus accessing cohort school options.

Next slide, please.

Go for it.

Yes.

Director Sarju, can you ask your question in the mic?

Sorry.

I didn't catch what you said.

I heard words, but I'm not sure I understood.

38%, can you just restate it?

Yep, okay, so I'm gonna say it, and I'll say it in a different way as well.

So let's say, I'm just gonna say Gatewood, this isn't the actual numbers for Gatewood, but at Gatewood, in that attendance area, there'll be a certain number of kids that are qualified for highly capable services, and a certain percentage of those kids decide to attend Gatewood or access something else, such as an option school or the highly capable model.

So what this data point is saying is currently 38% of students that are qualified for highly capable services are choosing to access those services in their neighborhood school versus another option school or a cohort school.

A different way of saying it is that the majority of kids are either doing the cohort model or this other thing.

I'm sorry.

I asked him a question, and that was a distractive interruption.

Did you understand my question?

Before we were interrupted, I think what you were saying is another way to say it.

Okay, so the 38% stay in their neighborhood school.

Yes.

What I'm curious about is how many families are interested in the cohort model?

So if I hear you correctly, Director Sarge, what you were saying is that another way to say this would be that 62% are accessing either the cohort model or an option school.

Okay, so the option school.

Okay, now that the light bulb is going on.

So if we remove the 38% and we talk about the 62, that's right math, right?

That's right?

Of the 62%, how many are interested in the cohort model?

You see where I'm going with this?

Because we've gotten a lot of testimony about this cohort model.

And honestly, this is like...

whiplash, decades of decades of whiplash for parents not having a consistent and reliable model in which they can count on from year to year.

And so in that 62%, maybe you don't have the number, but is it the majority of the 62% that are interested in the cohort model and a smaller number are going to option schools or is it the other around, is it about 50-50?

That I don't know in the moment, but we'll pull it for you, and we'll pull it for sure.

So what we'll get you is percent attending neighborhood, percent attending cohort, percent attending option, if that's helpful.

Yeah, but for the record, the vast majority of people are not interested in staying in their neighborhood school.

If you say 38% choose the neighborhood school, that means the majority are not.

Are not choosing the neighborhood school at this time.

Continue.

Okay.

Next slide, please.

So budget and spending, essentially, when you think about highly capable servicing in the state of Washington, it's actually based on student enrollment.

So it goes off 5%.

So in general, what we see is in Seattle Public Schools receive around $1.7 million annually.

As we were just discussing in the previous presentation, enrollment is fluctuating.

And so that number does fluctuate just depending on the number of kids that we have enrolled.

But it is 5%.

The funding is intended to use for universal screening, the program administration, professional development, servicing, et cetera.

And we're currently in the process of developing the budget going into 25-26.

It essentially becomes like a spending plan for the 1.7 million on how we're going to do these things.

One of the things to note is just a good chunk of the money ends up going into program administration and universal screening, because we do have to screen all of those students.

And if you think about some of the cohort models in general, those are not included in the $1.7 million.

Those are done on top of the $1.7 million that we receive.

Next slide, please.

So next steps.

One more time.

We need to do an update to 2190 superintendent procedure.

We are in the process of hiring a new director of advanced learning.

This is going to be really important for the school district because this person will be someone who's out there engaging with community around the next steps and what the models need to look like.

We need to review and refine the neighborhood school implementation to determine future states.

So for example, we need to look through what is the professional development implementation and how is it going.

I think we heard clearly today testimony from many people that what we're saying and what is happening may not be aligning.

And so we have an obligation to investigate and interrogate that professional development to see what's happening.

Appropriate support for schools to support the CSIP implementation.

It is in their CSIPs, and they have an obligation to implement it.

So the question becomes, how are we making sure to support them so kids are getting what they need?

We need to decide on the next steps for the current and upcoming school year and the AL budget.

fully develop Seattle Public Schools multi-tiered systems of support.

This is related to an earlier presentation this evening as well around curricular embedded assessments.

A lot of that stuff provides the foundation for us to get into a multi-tiered system of support, which means how do we support our kids when they need it, whether it's accelerated learning, whether it is intervention, whether it is enrichment.

That foundation comes through having a functional MTSS system district-wide.

And then I'm going to pause now, I think, for additional data requests, questions, thoughts, concerns.

Perfect.

I appreciate that.

Director Mizrahi, I know you have to leave.

Do you have any questions before?

Okay.

Okay.

Perfect.

I'm sorry.

I don't know who did it first.

Director Rankin.

What'd you say?

Oh, okay, okay.

So yeah, I do think it's really important that we acknowledge that what we're saying is happening in neighborhood schools isn't happening.

And I can attest to that as a parent as well.

I'm also concerned about The second to last bullet point here, fully developed SPS multi-tiered systems of support, which is my understanding the board directed SPS to implement MTSS in 2011. And it is now 2025. So 14 years later and we still don't have it fully implemented.

And it points to a chronic issue, I think, in this district of ideas and words on paper and then a failure to implement.

And so the fact that MTSS, after 14 years, still hasn't been implemented, you can understand why people are really doubtful that we will implement a successful neighborhood model.

So I guess I'm just curious what, and I know that was before your time, Rocky before my time too, so I'm not saying you bear responsibility for that.

It's an institutional problem that we have.

So I'll address, and then Dr. Jones, if you want to jump in, please.

But there's a couple things.

One, what we know is I would not go to a place of the neighborhood school model is not working.

We have plenty of evidence points of where it is working.

What we do know, though, is it universally working, is every single school making it to what we would expect, I think that's the question.

Because we do have evidence of some schools that are doing it and doing it very well.

The students are growing very well, regardless of if they have IEPs, whether they're multilingual, whether they're highly capable, they're meeting growth goals and exceeding them.

And so I just wanna point that part out.

But to your point, this is specifically talking about having a functional system district-wide because what we're seeing is very similar that some schools actually have a pretty good MTSS, but it can't be that some schools have a functional MTSS.

It needs to be that as a parent, as a community member, you have a guarantee that no matter where your kid goes to school, it's gonna be a functional MTSS system.

The other thing to consider is when you think about mobility rates in the city of Seattle and kids that move through schools, it needs to be that if a kid moves from one school in the city for whatever the reason is to another, we're not losing any of their data, any of their enrichment plans, any of their, and so that's what we mean by refining the system and duly noted.

And one of the things that we're gonna be bringing forward in the near future to the audit committee is the MTSS audit that we had around what are the next steps we need to do in the district to get this done well.

And so there's a whole corrective action plan that goes with that and a plan in sequence to finally get it to a place where we're not talking about it 15 years from now and it's not done.

It's actually gonna be focused through, if you know what I'm saying.

Do you have any follow-up?

I just think at this point the only thing that's going to have an impact or convince anybody is just action, you know, to see it actually happen.

Makin' it real.

Director Rankin.

Thank you.

It might be a while.

And I'm gonna try not to cry.

So I was a four-year-old kindergartner reading chapter books in Seattle Public Schools.

I have had the experience of growing up with a sibling and raising a child that have had major behavioral issues and hate school because it doesn't feel relevant to them and I know they're not alone in this.

It feels like a pointless waste of time and this is the reason that my younger son is now enrolled in the Cascade Parent Partnership.

He literally could not tolerate six and a half hours of sitting there, feeling like, he actually said, this does not feel like a good use of my time, to which I'm like, you're 12, what else are you gonna be doing?

But for him to just be like, I can't do this.

And as, a twice exceptional adult, whatever we want to say, I feel the same, like I am crawling out of my skin right now because I cannot stand that I am here after being part of this conversation for over a decade listening to the same presentation and having to just rehash what we already know to be true and nothing's changing.

And the conversation started with saying, that the board directed this extra thing in policy.

It is not extra, it's what's in state law.

So I have been gaslit over this for two years, and I just have to say it out loud so that we can be clear, so I can stop being told the opposite of what is in law is what we're supposed to do.

So in September, of 2023 after spending huge chunks of my personal time with my family visiting my brother in montana on the phone with distraught parents who could not get their kid into a math class that was being offered at their school simply because they didn't attend a cohort school even though they were perfectly capable of doing so i wrote this memo i wrote a math memo and a highly capable memo i'm here now instead of with my kids who need me So the people who come and go to the podium and the people who are here instead of with their families, they may come and go.

They may just become more people.

But I am here every month for two and a half, three more years.

I mean, maybe.

Because this is absolutely demoralizing and exhausting to feel like I'm just repeating and treading water.

And it's not worth the sacrifice that my family has had to make for me to be here to have it be so disregarded.

So, RCW and WAC, RCW is Revised Code of Washington.

That is law, so RCW has a whole bunch of numbers.

That's state law.

WAC, Washington Administrative Code, is rules associated with carrying out the law.

Could kind of think of it as policy and procedure.

No matter what you think about highly capable services, whether it should or shouldn't exist, it actually doesn't matter.

It's in state law.

The instructional program of basic education provided by each school district shall include implementation of programs for highly capable students under RCW 28A.185.010 through 28, oh my gosh, my reading glasses are up there, 28A.185.030.

Highly capable services or basic education according to our law, we are agents of the state.

It's our obligation and duty to hold the district accountable.

We're elected by our community, not to figure out how to do this.

That's not our job.

The only qualifications that we have to be up here are being registered to vote, running where we're registered to vote.

We are not the people.

We are a part-time governing body.

The people with PhDs and six-figure salaries should be having this conversation, not us.

So, Washington Administrative Code in association with the state law says, this is WAC 392-170-020, District's Plans for the Highly Capable Program.

Each district shall submit an annual plan for the district's highly capable program on forms provided by the Superintendent of Public Instruction for approval.

That's an annual vote, folks may have been aware of that.

Last year we, push it off multiple times because we didn't get actually the plan.

And it was the very last minute that it was approved so that we didn't lose the funding with the policy update that required we actually see the plan.

So the WAC says each district shall submit an annual plan.

Okay, then there's another WAC, board approval.

The district's plan, the plan I just mentioned, for students who are highly capable shall be annually approved by formal action of the district's board of directors.

Annual vote to approve the plan.

Substance, this is WAC 392-170-030, is the substance of the school district plan.

And this is what our updates in September were made to include, is what state administrative code requires are components of the plan that the board annually approves.

A report of the number of K-12 students who are highly capable that the district expects to serve by grade level.

A description of the district's plan to identify students consistent with RCW blah blah, that's the one that says yes you have to do this.

District practices for identifying The most highly capable students must prioritize equitable identification of low-income students.

The third requirement of the plan, a description of the highly capable program goals.

And it's not just do the bare minimum of false state law.

A description of the services the highly capable program will offer.

If we had that description of what the program was offering, that would answer a whole lot of questions as to what is it?

And then is it happening for my kid or not?

And then what do I do if it's not?

But we don't even know what the services are.

We can't even evaluate because we don't have that information.

A description of the instructional program the highly capable program will provide.

A description of ongoing professional development for educators of students who are highly capable and general education staff.

A description of how the highly capable program will be evaluated that includes information on how the district's highly capable program goals and student achievement outcomes will be measured.

A FISCAL REPORT AND ASSURANCES SIGNED BY THE DISTRICT'S AUTHORIZED REPRESENTATIVE THAT THE DISTRICT WILL COMPLY WITH ALL APPLICABLE STATUTES AND REGULATIONS.

SO ANNUALLY OUR STATE ADMINISTRATIVE CODE SAYS THE BOARD IN A FORMAL ACTION IS SUPPOSED TO APPROVE A PLAN THAT INCLUDES ALL OF THOSE THINGS.

WE HAVE NEVER SEEN THAT.

Then the end of the year report is that the district submits to the superintendent of public instruction at the close of each fiscal year, an end of the year report on forms provided the superintendent that includes some of the information in the plan.

We have been asked every year to approve the form that goes to OSPI.

We're supposed to approve the plan And then at the end of the year, the district sends the form to OSPI, part of which is affirming that the board has seen and approved the plan.

And I have been having this conversation with people in this room for two years who keep trying to tell me the OSPI form is the plan.

So somebody...

like help me here because what's in the plan and what's now in our policy that I had to fight to get brought to the board is what is in the WASDA model policy and is in compliance with state law.

So no, we're not asking for some extra information because we're special extra Seattle before the plan.

We're saying we need this information annually to accept to ensure that our students are being served in accordance with the law and at the end of the year, you affirm that to OSPI.

We don't have to do that part.

we can we could vote twice I guess but our job this is this is our job as the accountability body is to annually review the substance of the annual school district plan and approve it and that is what tells us whether or not students are being served We don't need a presentation on the history of past programs.

We don't need to talk about how we individually think, what our opinions are of how it should be done.

We're not in the classroom.

We're the oversight.

And so I'm just, I'm really upset because I feel gaslit.

I feel like I have been run around in circles and told that I'm being unnecessarily picky or whatever.

And, you know, this is what it looks like.

If I was a kid, I would be a chair throwing kid right now because this is what it looks like when you're not seen as your whole self and allowed to just be, hey, you're a whole person.

You're a whole person.

And I listen to you and respect you and expect the same from you.

This is what it looks like when someone has been dismissed and gaslit, especially as board president.

And I'm not the president anymore, so I don't speak for the board.

I'm just speaking for myself.

I would like to know when we're going to get the substance of the school district plan, that according to our policy, we are supposed to get early enough in the year, in the school year, to know that our students are being served for that year.

And I do not want to hear anything else about this.

I want to see the plan that's required.

I want to give staff an opportunity to respond, and then I think it was Director Bragg, Director Sarju, and then Director Hersey.

So there's compliance issues, access issues, quality issues, service issues, and consistency issues that we want to make sure that we're addressing.

And I hear clearly Director Rankin's desire to have clarity on the date, time of when the plan will be submitted.

My commitment is in April 1st as the date for that plan.

And so if that's a preview of that at the March meeting, we can provide that.

But the plan should be ready by March 1st.

And Dr. Torres Morales, if you can confirm that, we're making a declaration right now.

Yes.

Director Bragg.

I agree with everything you said.

And my initial comment when I was just reading this over is, you talk a lot about the current model and the future policy model.

But then we've also heard a lot from the testimony that the current model is, there is that lack of where what is happening in schools versus what we're being told is supposed to be happening.

Because I cannot imagine the transition to the future model without the current model even working.

From the student perspective, switching to new plans and new models when you're in school is going to be painful no matter what.

There's no easy thing to do that.

But the students currently in there who are experiencing what's currently happening and the transition that's trying to happen and it not working is just going to get worse and worse when you try to transition to that new model without addressing that it works first and also having more concrete of that future plan and how that's going to transition.

And that's just, it wasn't in this presentation, and I think what Director Rankin is getting at there, with like seeing that plan is the most necessary there, because you just can't, ask them to approve this without knowing that.

And I do also want to know if there is more of a plan to make sure that the current model is actually happening.

Yes, and that's what will be brought forward prior to April 1st.

Director Sarju.

So, for the audience and for the record.

What you're seeing here is frustration.

Not necessarily, the cause is not necessarily the two people sitting at the table.

Meaning, what I mean by that is this situation predates them.

I don't want another presentation.

That is the president's purview to approve what happens, but I'm going to tell you I'm going to get up and walk out if we have another one of these presentations.

This is the same model year after year, decade after decade.

What the parents want to know is how are their children who are in the highly capable program going to receive services?

It's not complex.

And yet, every time we bring this issue up, I don't understand, are we transitioning from the cohort model because of costs?

Well, maybe.

I was having a conversation with a parent in the audience, and I said, I don't, I'm not against dismantling, quote unquote, dismantling the cohort model, but I can't support the dismantling of a cohort model without a coherent implementable plan that works for kids, not you parents.

These are your children.

This needs to work for them, not for you individually.

That's what we need, and that's what essentially I think parents are asking for.

Yes, they're coming up as parents.

They care about their kids.

They're advocating, but the reason why they're coming up is because there isn't a plan by which we can understand and see how it's going to work on the other side.

And so to keep having, and this is not a diss on my friend Rocky, this is not a diss on you, but we've got to stop these presentations.

It is almost eight o'clock and you have presented nothing new.

And that's not about you, but the reason why we keep coming back to the table every four or five years is because the work isn't being done.

We need a solution for the highly capable children in our district that is not gonna change every two or three years.

This is a literal whiplash.

I am so exasperated.

My oldest is going to be 35 years old.

He entered kindergarten in 1995. I don't know how many conversations we've had about highly capable.

I could probably go back and look at some ancient record.

But we keep having this conversation over and over again because we can't get to an implementable plan.

I don't think it's unrealistic for the parents to expect Consistency.

We expect consistency in the classroom.

When children show up, they need consistency, predictability, reliability every day when they come into the classrooms.

And right now, they feel like they're not getting it.

Because when I asked that 38% versus whatever the number is, 62, I have to question in my head, and again, this is not a full analysis.

Well, if the majority of parents and the data says that the kids are doing well under the cohort model, why are we changing it?

I don't know what the data says, because I haven't seen anything.

I haven't even seen a plan.

At this point, we vote.

Honestly, if we're being honest, we voted on a plan we ain't never seen.

That's what happened.

We voted on a plan we actually haven't seen.

And so I don't want to keep coming to this table.

I'm asking future presentations, present us something that is coherent, that is clear, that is understandable, and that's implementable.

Our children deserve that.

And right now, we can't reliably hold them accountable.

Stop.

You need to go back to the Apple store.

And I won't be there.

I'm done.

I'm exasperated.

I'm being really honest.

And you're getting the brunt of this exasperation.

But let's stop this game.

This is a game.

We get presented information.

And yet nothing seems to change.

And let's come back to this table so that these families and the ones who came and testified and the ones who left can come back.

They may not like it.

Y'all may not like the plan.

You'll get over it.

But there will be a plan for your children that's going to work for the collective of children, not your individual child.

If it works mostly for everybody, we do the tweaks for the kids it's not working for, right?

So you may not like it.

I may not like it.

But what we want is a plan that can be implemented across the district.

If you move from your neighborhood to my neighborhood, you can expect something similar.

Right now, you don't know what to expect.

That's where I want to get to.

I think we're way past this.

We're way overdue.

We're long overdue for a solution.

That is long-term.

I'm looking for a long-term sustainable solution.

It's taken me all that talking to get there.

I want a long-term sustainable solution that works for the vast majority of kids in that program.

I don't have the answer to that, but that's what we need, that's what our kids deserve, and that's where we need to go.

Director Hersey.

Thank you.

Is there any information, Director Sarju, that you needed from them before I begin?

There isn't any information.

Give me.

Okay.

All right.

I was just trying to clarify.

Okay.

So the first thing that I think is super important here is just acknowledging the fact that, like, A lot of folks are going to experience change.

Whatever their child is receiving right now is going to, for the folks in this room, for the most part, for some of their children, stay the same.

But for others, they cannot guarantee that they're going to get the same level of services.

regardless of where you might be at on this spectrum of the conversation that I know that we've been having for a very long time, not just in the context of tonight, but decades, acknowledging that change is going to be different.

And different doesn't necessarily mean good.

It also doesn't necessarily mean bad.

But the unknown is incredibly scary for a lot of folks, especially after the year we've had.

I get that.

A lot of folks at this table get that.

And that's real.

So I want to make sure that folks understand that that is not to be dismissed.

And there is the very real reality that we do have, or rather, we are at a precipice of change that needs to be decided.

And we need to press forward in some way.

So I have a few questions to that regard.

The first question that I have is, what makes you feel confident that you are able, given the conversation that we have had here tonight, that we are going to be able to deliver the same quality of services.

And I really want to like peg on that service for a second when we come back.

under the model of MTSS, and if you are not confident that we are going to be able to do that by the time you're asking us to vote on it, what allocations, or rather what resources need to be reallocated to better position y'all to do that?

So the confidence is we do have it working in some places.

We have evidence of that.

To take that to scale and have some reassurances, that's going to be difficult.

But we do have some evidence.

I'll let Dr. Torres Morales talk a little bit about a couple of examples that we have this working.

But we have something to work with in terms of understanding how to implement this, how to make sure it's a service delivery model that gets students what they need.

So, Dr. Torres, if you wanna talk about the two models that we've been working with that you find to be promising.

Yep, and then I'll also just add that when we come forward in the next iteration, we'll be bringing some data, because what at least initial data are looking like, and this isn't confirmed yet, What we're seeing is that we're not seeing a huge difference.

And what I mean by that is families who are choosing to keep their kids in the neighborhood school model versus access to cohort model, in general, within some small standard deviation, we're seeing the same results.

So what is that telling us?

That there are a lot of kids who are in their neighborhood school who are getting what they need because they're growing at the same pace as those kids that are in the cohort models.

So there's a couple schools that have engaged in inclusion work and UDL work with fidelity for some time now.

When you look at those schools and you see the academic performance of the students in those schools, it's actually quite remarkable.

And that includes multilingual students, students with disabilities, students with highly capable designations, all being in the same neighborhood school.

And so do we have evidence that this works when we have schools and communities that are engaging in it fully?

Absolutely.

Is that something that we can do to scale within the district?

Absolutely.

Now, does that also mean that we have to take some time to have a conversation over what does this look like in the future?

Is it that we're going to do that at every school?

To Director Sargery's point, if there's a lot of people accessing the cohort already, do we go down that path?

I think we have the data.

We need to bring everything forward and say this is what this would look like.

Sure.

Up to and including if we need to bring videos of classes so people can see them and have a little bit more clarity around what these things look like.

But it is possible and it is happening currently in our system.

Great.

Thank you.

I think in addition to the data, given everything that you know when you bring it forward, a very realistic and honest timeline from your perspective of how long it would take to implement at every school, right?

And if that's a decade, it's a decade.

You know what I'm saying?

Then that comes back to the board to say it's not quick enough.

And then, but Let me cook.

What I'm saying is, then we need to have hard conversations about, again, what we are willing to do to expedite that process.

This is all interconnected.

So when we're talking about adding in a math goal, when we're talking about increasing 10% to 15%, and we got a monetary allocation for what would it take for that to be possible.

When I was talking about this three weeks ago, these decisions don't happen in a vacuum.

When we have been getting all of the education from the Council of Great City Schools and so many other institutions that are helping us become better at our governance model, I think that it's easy for us to say, oh, the district is not providing X, Y, and Z, and don't get it twisted.

In many cases and respects, they're not.

At the same time, I don't believe that we are holding up our end of the bargain and really doing our side of the work as a board to be brave and say, look, we're not going to do X so that we can do Y.

And we need to be unapologetic about what our priorities are based on all of the work that thanks to Director Rankin and all of the data and information we got back from the vision and values of our communities.

We are in a financial crisis.

We can't afford to do everything.

We just can't.

We can do everything, but it's not going to be well done.

So we need to be really clear and pick what it is that we are going to do well and be really honest with ourselves with what we can't afford to do as well as other things.

I think that's a hard conversation.

It's unpopular, but that in and of itself is governance, right?

I have a few more questions.

I really want to know what, from y'all's perspective, because I think that this is going to be super helpful for community, too.

If y'all bring forward this plan in a timeline and we decide that it is not fast enough, we also need to know what are the options that are available to us as a board to be able to expedite this process.

Please give us some suggestions of things that we can let go of so that we can go out and have a real conversation with community about, hey, We have heard very clearly during public comment tonight that this is a high priority for us to be able to figure out and to figure out well.

This is also a microcosm of all of the students that we serve.

So I would be remissed And I love y'all.

Don't get it twisted.

But if I made a decision for the entire district based on public testimony tonight, I'm not saying y'all are wrong.

I'm just saying I don't know.

So I need to have a slate of options that I can take to all communities throughout the district so that we can do our work of understanding what are the vision and values of our community around this particular issue.

I don't get paid to know what those options are.

That's why I'm asking y'all.

I don't expect an answer for that.

It is a request.

The next piece.

I need to be super honest.

I think I am the only person at this particular table amongst the board who has led a classroom for half a decade.

And I need to be super clear.

I am not having taught in both a highly capable and a non-highly capable environment.

I am very, I wanna be super careful as I say this, two years of acceleration is not equal to receiving highly capable services.

And I need to be super clear.

I know that it's great, and the cohort model is serving children in a really significant way, especially children that were not thriving in a standard learning environment.

That is a real benefit, and that does not necessarily mean that those are highly capable services.

Your child is receiving something different that is working for them, but to equate that to highly capable services, is doing your child a disservice.

Because what I know as an educator is that true differentiation goes leagues above doing two years ahead in math.

It's cool that our kids can do that, but there's a lot of data that suggests that that is not going to help them long term in life.

What it does provide and what is a real benefit is an alternative environment when the standard learning environment is not serving a child equitably or adequately.

These two issues are different.

I don't have a good answer because this is why, again, to bring it full circle, to lose that when a family has found that is a significant loss.

It is a big deal.

However, that loss cannot be inextricably linked to the delivery of highly capable services.

So we have to be able to have two conversations at once.

So my question is, if we change, pretend I am a parent, I'm very excited to be a parent, and hopefully if Rainier View is open when my child is born at some point, I am really excited for them to go there.

I'm not yet, but hang with me.

I'm working on it actively.

So here's my question.

Pretend I'm a parent and I have a child that is not receiving their highly capable services as outlined in the plan that y'all are going to bring forth.

What is my recourse in that instance?

What can I do to ensure that my child is receiving all of the things that they deserve as articulated in your plan?

So I want to clarify your question first.

Please.

So essentially, when we come forward with all the details, one of the things you want to see in there is essentially, let's say here's this, here's this, here's this, and little Brandon's in school.

Yep.

And then all of a sudden you're like, well, this is not what's happening.

Or it is what's happening and it's still not working for my kid.

Yes.

Two different tracks.

What is the next step?

Yes.

In the moment, what I would say is, what you're going to hear is around how do we access connections with the principal at the building, with the actual teacher.

There are resources that we can push in in terms of like, advanced learning specialists, which are teachers on assignment that work and go into classrooms.

They currently exist in our current model.

But they go in there to work with the teacher to specifically address little Brandon's needs.

But that is something that duly noted and to make sure we detail more out almost around, I don't want to call it an appeal, but some sort of like what is an escalation process for families if it doesn't feel like this is working that is just very clear for them in those cases.

Exactly.

And in addition to that, right, because like As an educator and as a person who is serving on a board, I hear that.

And I know for a fact that the way that y'all are articulating and designing this plan, that you hear me, right?

The only other end of that, it has been my firsthand experience that that process can take an entire year.

And by that time, the child has moved on to a different teacher that may or may not be meeting those needs as well.

And then before you know it, an entire child's elementary experience has been trying to get them services that they have ultimately not received.

So what I am also asking for in addition to that is what parameters are in place to ensure that that is handled in a timeline that actually gets kids the services.

Because what we know is that, like, yes, push and model, help the teacher, get the principal involved.

That's a lot of triangulation that at a building that may or may not have, like, maybe they have a high turnover.

Maybe they have a new principal.

People move.

And that's just a part of running a system that's large.

But being the director of the largest district per school basis here I have seen that there is, in fact, a lot of turnover specifically in South End schools for lots of reasons, right?

The stability that my kids experience is very different than the stability that some kids in other parts of the city experience.

So again, I'm not asking you to solve that problem, but what I am asking is not only what is the path of rescores, but what are the, I would say, systematic assurances And the timeline for making sure that if a child is not receiving services as they are detailed in the plan, that within a reasonable amount of time, they are going to get to receiving those services.

Yeah, I have.

Yeah, there's about two or three points.

I know.

Please, no.

I'll hit on them.

I appreciate it.

All of the pieces we're talking about are very interconnected.

So if we go all the way back to earlier this evening, Dr. Perkins and Dr. Starosky talking about the importance of, hey, look how many people are actually completing the curricular-based assessments, the curriculum-based assessments, what Eliza, or Director Rankin was a friend who has the unit test.

Those things are actually really important.

Because if we go back to just teaching and learning, the teaching and learning cycle, one of the first things is, and if we use little Brandon as the example, in order for us to determine, is this an intervention issue?

Do we need to accelerate in the classroom and all those sort of things?

We need that sort of data to tell us where the student is at.

The other piece to that is when we start getting that done district-wide, that is the foundation to Director Briggs' question around MTSS, like what is happening?

And so just raising that up because understanding that for decades it has not happened and want to clarify that it is in the process of happening now and all the foundational pieces are moving.

To the point, though, is When you're thinking about a timeline, one of the things that we're moving into next year now, I think many of you are aware, and if you're not, we've had a consultant called Novak Education.

We've been working on what's called the inclusion initiative, and there's been schools that have been able to opt in or opt out in those sort of things.

The schools that have opted in and done all the PD, all the work with the teachers, all the things, we are seeing amazing results out of those schools.

Given that, where we're moving now, for example, into next year is everybody's going to be doing it.

It's not going to be an optional, I get to do it or I don't.

So when you get to your question around, hey, in timeline, once these two things merge and the system starts going, it's going to be pretty solid and lockstep.

So for example, little Brandon might be at Rainier View.

He might need to be accelerated.

that data is going to live somewhere that if he has to move and go to West Woodland for whatever the reason may be, that information is still there.

And MTSS functional structure is still there.

Whatever the acceleration that student needs is still there.

And so all the pieces that we've been hitting on even throughout the evening is really directing towards what your question is.

I think the only other piece that you asked earlier and that I hadn't talked about was just allocations.

And so one of the things that we have done as a district is in our budget last year, I've already advocated for it to stick for next year, is there is a chunk of money that protects that level of professional development for that inclusion initiative.

And that is something that we do have to be aware of and hold onto to move this plan continually forward.

That's all super clear to me and that actually prompts one last question.

In what way are school leaders and educators and directors of schools held accountable to implementation of MTSS.

I know that since there's probably opt-in, it's probably not baked into an evaluation or something like that, right?

But what I want to know is that what is the link between professional development and reasonable expectations around implementation and performance?

Because, and I want to tread very carefully here, Though, I believe strongly that the pretense of MTSS has an innate value, not only in the context of highly capable, but also for both our math and our reading goal, right?

All interconnected.

So what is your administration willing to do in terms of if we are offering this as a solution to double down as well on the accountability metrics for teaching, utilizing with fidelity the NTSS strategies that we are putting in front of educators, principals, and the entire system?

So one way from a system-wide perspective, every school has to have elements of tier one instruction in their C-SIBs.

And so people are being accountable to that.

It's in evaluations around...

How is this not only embedded in your CSIP, how is this manifesting in the classroom?

What's observable?

What feedback are you getting on this?

Are you doing walkthroughs to see what these critical elements are?

So it's now aligned.

And the next step is integration.

So it comes easily, naturally.

It's part of just practice.

And so this is the first time that we've had CSIPS aligned, excuse me, MTSS goals and objectives aligned in CSIPS.

And it really speaks to student populations who they know from their school-based data who need the services and in a timely, relevant way.

I'll say related to this, I know I was hitting on earlier that with Director Briggs and upcoming audit committee, we're going to bring forward this MTSS needs assessment and what the corrective action plan is.

Sure.

What you would see, what you're going to see in that plan and essentially in there is very much related to what you're saying.

Because through the first years of the cohorts, we did a lot of reflection over what's working well, what's not.

What we found was there were some schools that did all the PD, all the things.

The results for kids have been outstanding.

We're going to make sure to share some of that data with y'all.

On the flip side, there were some schools where it was, I think I want to do this, and I want to do that, and I might do this piece, or I might do that piece.

Guess what?

Their data wasn't as strong as the other schools.

And so one of the things we've been sitting with is, what is it that we need to do differently as we're moving this to all the schools to make sure that it sticks?

So for example, moving it more into a coaching and a tracking model.

And what does that mean?

So between regional executive directors, the NOVAC consulting team, let's say Director Rankin's our principal, and here's the topic.

It's UDL 101. It's not going to be essentially that the NOVAC team is going to come in and say, here's your UDL 101. That's an option for you if your school wants it.

But we found a lot, especially we are the city of Seattle, so we need to own this.

Our schools are their own individual entity within a system.

And the leader often wanted to say, well, this is how we do it here.

And so it became a conversation of, OK, that's fair.

But here's the baseline standards for what this means for Seattle Public Schools.

Yes, and here's your PowerPoint.

Let's vet that together.

Go ahead, do your PD with your teachers.

Or who's your lead teacher that wants to come in and do that?

And those are on all those elements.

So fast forward, when we get into the whole district-wide model, what this is gonna look like is, it's almost like a scoping of here's your school, Leader, here's your PDs on UDL, multi-tiered systems of support, restorative practices, and you're working with your team and your BLT and your school to go through, okay, here's where we're at, here's where we're at, but on the back end, there is some protections of, here's the baseline of what your RP 101, your restorative practice 101 training needs to look like in Seattle Public Schools, make it the West Woodland way, but these need to be in there.

And someone working with them around those presentations and those professional development, and that happening across the system.

Okay, so just to repeat that back because you and I know a lot of those acronyms and whatnot.

No, I know.

So just to make sure that there's clarity, when we are providing instructional materials for professional development purposes to principals, There is a common denominator, a baseline quality of instruction that is going to be expected of every single building.

But because we know that Seattle is Seattle and our schools are unique entities within a system, there will still be an opportunity for schools to deliver it within reason, in their own way, that is responsive to their community, but there will be, at a bare minimum, expectation of quality and methods around instruction in delivering these services.

Yes.

Perfect.

I'm done.

Thank you.

Briggs or Sarju?

I meant, Director Briggs or Rankin?

So I want to second a lot of what Brandon said.

And he's the only K-12 classroom leader I've taught at the post-secondary level.

Just have to get that in there.

But yeah, K-12 is a different, it's a whole different thing.

There are two other issues that have come up in testimony and in emails that we're getting that are 100% operational.

that need to be solved that I'm not asking to be solved right now, because it's actually not our job, but that are going to continue to come up.

And it's connected to last year's conversation on school consolidations and enrollment and everything, and it's actually connected to other testimony that people gave about option schools.

When we have fewer students and large amounts of empty space in our buildings, capacity is not in physical space, it's in staffing.

So...

The option schools that are saying, you're not letting kids in, there's plenty of room.

If a new classroom is opened, that takes a classroom teacher away from a neighboring school.

And so there's no, I don't believe option schools are not being singled out in this way.

We have different capacity based on the number of kids and the number of staff in the building.

because that is how we're funded on a per pupil basis.

The state does not care how many schools we have.

We could close all the schools and have T-Mobile be one school and we would have the number of teachers of T-Mobile Stadium.

We would have the number of teachers corresponding to the number of students.

That same number of teachers and number of students exists with students in 106 buildings.

So we have plenty of space at my school.

Why aren't they letting more kids in?

It's because it would open another classroom.

It's a staff issue.

It's not a space issue.

And if we were more appropriately sized, as we had the conversation last year, the staff capacity and the space capacity would be closer to each other.

So, but the operational issue at Cascadia and Decatur that needs to be had with those communities, not with us, is one of our newest, nicest, largest buildings is gonna be half empty next year because we didn't do any boundary changes.

So I need to know, and the board will have to approve, we have to approve boundary changes.

What is being addressed to do that and what it's gonna look like next October when both of these schools have fewer students as every other school is projected to and they lose teachers and they don't have access to music anymore and they don't have access to art or whatever the case may be, they may have split classes.

Are you gonna combine the schools so that the programming that they have is preserved and honestly, I'm gonna, like I have nothing to lose at this point.

Decatur never should have reopened.

That was a mistake 10 or so years ago.

We didn't actually need it.

Decatur reopened.

It was where Thornton Creek used to be.

Thornton Creek got a new double the size building because people love that school.

Kids moved from Decatur to Thornton Creek.

They filled that building.

had been kind of upgraded to meet the needs of the, I think it was used as a transition site or something, I can't remember.

And then the board at the time decided, what a great idea, high demand, highly capable, we're gonna open Decatur.

Well, in addition to 4,500 other optional seats north of the ship canal, that opened between 2016 and 2018. And now we are 4,200 students down from the pandemic.

So that added optional seats in optional programs.

And that is impacting all of our kids because the option schools now are...

full or at capacity because we can't we can't take away from the neighborhoods you know it's the balance of the staff so those things have real impacts but we could come up with a number of solutions it's not our job to do that it is our job to approve boundary changes if they're brought to us so in thinking about the service both the service delivery for students currently at Decatur and currently at Cascadia What is the impact to them on next year's enrollment projection and how are we not gonna let one of our best quality buildings not have students enjoying it and benefiting from it.

That's for you guys to solve.

And we'll approve it as needed if it requires boundary changes.

I want to be also really clear that nothing I should say should be taken as don't make any changes because having been part of this conversation around highly capable for over a decade, there are very real reasons that the board made the decision that they did to eliminate the cohort we're one of I don't know if we're the only district in the country or one of the only districts in the country where a whole separate school is required to attend in order to have the needs of gifted and highly capable students met there's lots of different models of you know different classes or walk to math or whatever and there's even some I'm sure there's some plenty of schools that have some students that are highly capable and some that are agenda track whatever but having a whole separate building where you have to go to one or another location or you don't have access is really, it should not continue.

And so I just want to be really clear about that, that shouldn't, I don't want anybody walking away thinking, oh, Director Rankin wants to revert back to 2019 and we just continue on.

We can't do that.

That would be such a disservice to the parents and students and educators and advocates that worked for so long.

to demand that more students have access to highly capable services and that it doesn't require that you leave your community to access it.

One other thing, to Brandon's point, about two years ahead, For a lot of kids, that's not gifted education.

That's two years ahead.

But I want to say on record or just out loud that what people found that they're afraid of losing is a place where their kids aren't the weird ones.

And I say that as a weird kid.

At Laurelhurst Elementary School in the 80s, everybody else sat in clusters.

I had a desk against the wall.

Because I was a delight to have in class, but I could be disruptive at times, and I was oh so energetic.

That was code for, there's something wrong with you, we don't have time for you, we don't wanna deal with you.

And so when you have parents coming here saying, please do not take that away from my kid, they're responding to the fact that their kid felt weird and bad about themselves in one of our schools.

And that the cohort has given them a place where they don't, where they're accepted by the adults?

Because this is not just a kid bullying issue.

This is an adult issue about how children who are different are treated.

And this applies to much more than highly capable.

So I just want to be really clear that the fear that you're hearing from people about my kid has a place where they belong and that's going to go away is a real fear.

and that it's not just about the academics.

Two years ahead, I mean, we have the internet now.

You can access any kind of knowledge or information you want at any time, you know, until the whole grid goes down and we're all in disaster mode.

But what they need is what they want, what they need, what they have found is a place where their kid is seen as a whole person.

Every single one of our students deserves to have that space, no matter what neighborhood they live in.

So, yeah, I just wanted to clarify.

I'm not saying pause it, but let's have real honest conversations.

We don't want perfection.

We want honesty, transparency, and progress.

Director Briggs.

Super snappy.

So we, I'm hearing the term accountability thrown around and I just want to underline that yes, that accountability is critical and it's lacking.

And I also want to acknowledge that accountability starts with the board.

That is literally our job.

we are elected to hold this district accountable and I want to acknowledge that I understand that that is our role.

I also want to request that families are communicated with ASAP.

Having a plan by April 1st doesn't answer a lot of questions for families who who need to make choices during the open enrollment period, and who have been asking questions for a long time and not getting answers.

And sometimes they will get a form letter that basically tells them, like, this is happening in your neighborhood school when that doesn't align with their reality.

So if meaningful communication, transparent, honest communication could go out to families as soon as possible, I think that is a really important step in this process because it's been These questions have been left unanswered for so long.

And families deserve to be leveled with.

So that is my request.

And that's all I have.

All right.

Just share with me the form letter piece, something, a little bit of specificity around that, just so I know.

Yeah, I will forward it to you.

Please do.

A parent inquired with the advanced learning department about, had a really, really specific questions that have come to many of us, many times at this point, and got back like a boilerplate letter.

Okay, if you could please.

Yeah, I will, I'll forward it to you.

Thank you.

want to wrap that up i think we at least as a board have sort of next steps on the accountability front i think a lot of this is board members needing clarity community families needing clarity and i hope we can get there and what i heard of is a lot of this cyclical cycle and hopefully we can somehow figure out how to break that and be an anomaly.

But before we adjourn tonight, I am going to turn it over to Director Sarju.

She's going to do a reading for us, I'm very excited about.

So thank you for the kids for coming up.

Who knows what month it is?

What month is it?

What month is it?

February, and there's something that we celebrate in February.

Do you all know what it is?

Black History Month.

Do we have any librarians in the audience?

So I have a library book.

that I'm carrying around with me.

I did not bring it today because I knew you all were going to show up.

This is a very special library book.

It's from Adams County School District Number 12 in Colorado.

A dear friend of mine was at a library where they were selling this book and she picked it up for me.

And the book is titled, Linda Brown, You Are Not Alone.

The Brown versus Board of Education Decision.

And so I'm going to read something to you all that I read to a college class that I lectured at yesterday.

And this class was aspiring teachers.

And for the adults in the room, I gave them a serious talking to.

But I ended with two readings from this book.

So first of all, February is the shortest month, and that's the month this nation has decided it's going to be Black History Month.

But what you all should know is that every month is Black History Month for me.

Does that make sense?

Why do you think it is?

Go ahead.

Amen.

Yes, that's, oh girl.

I don't know who your mama is, but whoever that is, she's done a good job.

Okay, so the first poem I'm going to read, the first thing I'm going to read is a poem called Desegregation.

If that isn't connected to highly capable, I don't know what is.

And it's by Eloise Greenfield.

We walk the long path lined with shouting nightmare faces, nightmare voices.

Inside the school, there are eyes that glare and eyes that are distant.

We wish for our friends.

We wish for our old laughing selves.

We hold our heads up, hold our tears in.

The grownups have said we must be brave, that only the children can save the country now.

The adults in the room better remember the last piece of that.

Only the children can save our country now.

This was written in 2002. And I just want us to think about where we are at in 2025. Only these children right here and all the other children who were here and all the other children in our 106 school buildings can save the country now.

That's you all.

That's your job.

It's to work hard, get smart, and save our country.

because clearly the adults right now are not able to do it.

Okay, the next thing I'm going to read is it's just one paragraph, but it's by Eloise Greenfield in her chapter called Legacy.

And so for the kids, this may not make sense because I'm not reading the whole chapter, But I think the last part will make sense to you.

This legacy then is a precious gift of courage, dedication, and struggle.

An inheritance handed by each generation to the next.

So that's from your parents to you.

That's from your grandparents to your parents to you.

That's what that means.

It is seen in the lives of teachers who teach children who learn in spite of the odds against them.

But the story is bigger than that.

And here I'm talking to the adults.

It encompasses people in every field doing what they do in the best way they can to make life better for generations of the children to come.

That's for the adults.

If we don't get this right, we don't get a second chance.

We need people on every field doing what they do in the best way they can to make life better for the generations of children to come.

The end.

Thank you for coming up and pretending to be students, because I'm not a teacher, but I sure like that.

Maybe I'll be a teacher one day.

Maybe that'll be my next gig after school board.

i don't know i don't know i appreciate everyone being here tonight and working to make life better for generations to come there being no further business to come before the board the regular board meeting is now adjourned at 8 34. thank you everyone